BOOK ONE
THE EMPEROR IN GOLD
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The lie stands alone, the solitary deceit with its back turned no matter the direction of your reluctant approach, and with each step your goal is driven on, your stride carried astray, the path enfolding upon itself, round and round you walk and what stood alone before you, errant as mischance, an accidental utterance, now reveals its legion of children, this mass seething in threads and knots and surrounded, you cannot draw breath, cannot move.
The world is of your making and one day, my friend, you will stand alone amidst a sea of dead, the purchasing of your words all about you and the wind will laugh you a new path into unending torment–the solitary deceit is its solitude, the lie is the lie standing alone, the threads and knots of the multitude tighten in righteous judgement with which you once so freely strangled every truthsayer, every voice of dissent.
So now ease your thirst on my sympathy and die parched in the wasteland.
Fragment found on the day the poetess Tesora Veddict was arrested by the Patriotists (six days before her Drowning)
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CHAPTER ONE
Two forces, once in vicious opposition, now found themselves virtual bedmates, although neither could decide which of them had their legs pried open first. The simple facts are these: the original hierarchical structure of the Tiste Edur tribes proved well-suited to the Letherii system of power through wealth. The Edur became the crown, settling easy upon the bloated gluttony of Lether, but does a crown possess will? Does the wearer buckle beneath its burden?
Another truth is now, in hindsight, self-evident. As seamless as this merging seemed to be, a more subtle, far deadlier conjoining occurred below the surface: that of the specific flaws within each system, and this blending was to prove a most volatile brew.
The Hiroth Dynasty (Volume XVII)
The Colony, a History of Lether
Dinith Arnara
‘W
here is this one from?’
Tanal Yathvanar watched the Invigilator slowly rotating the strange object in his pudgy hands, the onyx stones in the many ringson the short fingers glimmering in the shafts of sunlight that reached in through the opened window. The object Karos Invictad
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manipulated was a misshapen collection of bronze pins, the ends bent into loops that were twisted about one another to form a stiff cage. ‘Bluerose, I believe, sir,’ Tanal replied. ‘One of Senorbo’s. The average duration for solving it is three days, although the record is just under two—’
‘Who?’ Karos demanded, glancing up from where he sat behind his desk.
‘A Tarthenal half-blood, if you can believe that, sir. Here in Letheras. The man is reputedly a simpleton, yet possesses a natural talent for solving puzzles.’
‘And the challenge is to slide the pins into a configuration to create a sudden collapse.’
‘Yes sir. It flattens out. From what I have heard the precise number of manipulations is—’
‘No, Tanal, do not tell me. You should know better.’ The Invigilator, commander of the Patriotists, set the object down. ‘Thank you for the gift. Now,’ a brief smile, ‘have we inconvenienced Bruthen Trana long enough, do you think?’ Karos rose, paused to adjust his crimson silks – the only colour and the only material he ever wore – then collected the short sceptre he had made his official symbol of office, black bloodwood from the Edur homeland with silver caps studded in polished onyx stones, and gestured with it in the direction of the door.
Tanal bowed then led the way out into the corridor, to the broad stairs where they descended to the main floor, then strode through the double doors and out into the compound.
The row of prisoners had been positioned in full sunlight, near the west wall of the enclosure. They had been taken from their cells a bell before dawn and it was now shortly past midday. Lack of water and food, and this morning’s searing heat, combined with brutal sessions of questioning over the past week, had resulted in more than half of the eighteen detainees losing consciousness.
Tanal saw the Invigilator’s frown upon seeing the motionless bodies collapsed in their chains.
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The Tiste Edur liaison, Bruthen Trana of the Den-Ratha tribe, was standing in the shade, more or less across from the prisoners, and the tall, silent figure slowly turned as Tanal and Karos approached.
‘Bruthen Trana, most welcome,’ said Karos Invictad. ‘You are well?’
‘Let us proceed, Invigilator,’ the grey-skinned warrior said.
‘At once. If you will accompany me, we can survey each prisoner assembled here. The specific cases—’
‘I have no interest in approaching them any closer than I am now,’ Bruthen said. ‘They are fouled in their own wastes and there is scant breeze in this enclosure.’
Karos smiled. ‘I understand, Bruthen.’ He leaned his sceptre against a shoulder then faced the row of detainees. ‘We need not approach, as you say. I will begin with the one to the far left, then—’
‘Unconscious or dead?’
‘Well, at this distance, who can say?’
Noting the Edur’s scowl, Tanal bowed to Bruthen and Karos and walked the fifteen paces to the line. He crouched to examine the prone figure, then straightened. ‘He lives.’
‘Then awaken him!’ Karos commanded. His voice, when raised, became shrill, enough to make a foolish listener wince – foolish, that is, if the Invigilator was witness to that instinctive reaction. Such careless errors happened but once.
Tanal kicked at the prisoner until the man managed a dry, rasping sob. ‘On your feet, traitor,’ Tanal said in a quiet tone. ‘The Invigilator demands it. Stand, or I will begin breaking bones in that pathetic sack you call a body.’
He watched as the prisoner struggled upright.
‘Water, please—’
‘Not another word from you. Straighten up, face your crimes. You are Letherii, aren’t you? Show our Edur guest the meaning of that.’
Tanal then made his way back to Karos and Bruthen.
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The Invigilator had begun speaking. ‘... known associations with dissenting elements in the Physicians’ College – he has admitted as much. Although no specific crimes can be laid at this man’s feet, it is clear that—’
‘The next one,’ Bruthen Trana cut in.
Karos closed his mouth, then smiled without showing his teeth. ‘Of course. The next is a poet, who wrote and distributed a call for revolution. He denies nothing and indeed, you can see his stoic defiance even from here.’
‘And the one beside him?’
‘The proprietor of an inn, the tavern of which was frequented by undesirable elements – disenchanted soldiers, in fact – and two of them are among these detainees. We were informed of the sedition by an honourable whore—’
‘Honourable whore, Invigilator?’ The Edur half smiled.
Karos blinked. ‘Why, yes, Bruthen Trana.’
‘Because she informed on an innkeeper.’
‘An innkeeper engaged in treason—’
‘Demanding too high a cut of her earnings, more likely. Go on, and please, keep your descriptions of the crimes brief.’
‘Of course,’ Karos Invictad said, the sceptre gently tapping on his soft shoulder, like a baton measuring a slow march.
Tanal, standing at his commander’s side, remained at attention whilst the Invigilator resumed his report of the specific transgressions of these Letherii. The eighteen prisoners were fair representations of the more than three hundred chained in cells below ground. A decent number of arrests for this week, Tanal reflected. And for the most egregious traitors among them waited the Drownings. Of the three hundred and twenty or so, a third were destined to walk the canal bottom, burdened beneath crushing weights. Bookmakers were complaining these days, since no-one ever survived the ordeal any more. Of course, they did not complain too loudly, since the true agitators among 44
them risked their own Drowning – it had taken but a few of those early on to mute the protestations among the rest.
This was a detail Tanal had come to appreciate, one of Karos Invictad’s perfect laws of compulsion and control, emphasized again and again in the vast treatise the Invigilator was penning on the subject most dear to his heart. Take any segment of population, impose strict yet clear definitions on their particular characteristics, then target them for compliance. Bribe the weak to expose the strong. Kill the strong, and the rest are yours. Move on to the next segment.
Bookmakers had been easy targets, since few people liked them – especially inveterate gamblers, and of those there were more and more with every day that passed.
Karos Invictad concluded his litany. Bruthen Trana nodded, then turned and left the compound.
As soon as he was gone from sight, the Invigilator faced Tanal. ‘An embarrassment,’ he said. ‘Those unconscious ones.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘A change of heads on the outer wall.’
‘At once, sir.’
‘Now, Tanal Yathvanar, before anything else, you must come with me. It will take but a moment, then you can return to the tasks at hand.’
They walked back into the building, the Invigilator’s short steps forcing Tanal to slow up again and again as they made their way to Karos’s office.
The most powerful man next to the Emperor himself took his place once more behind the desk. He picked up the cage of bronze pins, shifted a dozen or so in a flurry of precise moves, and the puzzle collapsed flat. Karos Invictad smiled across at Tanal, then flung the object onto the desk. ‘Despatch a missive to Senorbo in Bluerose. Inform him of the time required for me to find a solution, then add, from me to him, that I fear he is losing his touch.’
‘Yes, sir.’
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Karos Invictad reached out for a scroll. ‘Now, what was our agreed percentage on my interest in the Inn of the Belly-up Snake?’
‘I believe Rautos indicated forty-five, sir.’
‘Good. Even so, I believe a meeting is in order with the Master of the Liberty Consign. Later this week will do. For all our takings of late, we still possess a strange paucity in actual coin, and I want to know why.’
‘Sir, you know Rautos Hivanar’s suspicions on that matter.’
‘Vaguely. He will be pleased to learn I am now prepared to listen more closely to said suspicions. Thus, two issues on the agenda. Schedule the meeting for a bell’s duration. Oh, and one last thing, Tanal.’
‘Sir?’
‘Bruthen Trana. These weekly visits. I want to know, is he compelled? Is this some Edur form of royal disaffection or punishment? Or are the bastards truly interested in what we’re up to? Bruthen makes no comment, ever. He does not even ask what punishments follow our judgements. Furthermore, his rude impatience tires me. It may be worth our while to investigate him.’
Tanal’s brows rose. ‘Investigate a Tiste Edur?’
‘Quietly, of course. Granted, they ever give us the appearance of unquestioning loyalty, but I cannot help but wonder if they truly are immune to sedition among their own kind.’
‘Even if they aren’t, sir, respectfully, are the Patriotists the right organization—’
‘The Patriotists, Tanal Yathvanar,’ said Karos sharply, ‘possess the imperial charter to police the empire. In that charter no distinction is made between Edur and Letherii, only between the loyal and the disloyal.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Now, I believe you have tasks awaiting you.’
Tanal Yathvanar bowed, then strode from the office.
*** 46
The estate dominated a shelf of land on the north bank of Lether River, four streets west of Quillas Canal. Stepped walls marking its boundaries made their way down the bank, extending out into the water – on posts to ease the current’s tug – more than two boat-lengths. Just beyond rose two mooring poles. There had been flooding this season. An infrequent occurrence in the past century, Rautos Hivanar noted as he leafed through the Estate Compendium – a family tome of notes and maps recording the full eight hundred years of Hivanar blood on this land. He settled back in the plush chair and, with contemplative languor, finished his balat tea.
The house steward and principal agent, Venitt Sathad, quietly stepped forward to return the Compendium to the wood and iron chest sunk in the floor beneath the map table, then replaced the floorboards and unfurled the rug over the spot. His tasks completed, he stepped back to resume his position beside the door.
Rautos Hivanar was a large man, his complexion florid, his features robust. His presence tended to dominate a room, no matter how spacious. He sat in the estate’s library now, the walls shelved to the ceiling. Scrolls, clay tablets and bound books filled every available space, the gathered learning of a thousand scholars, many of whom bore the Hivanar name.
As head of the family and overseer of its vast financial holdings, Rautos Hivanar was a busy man, and such demands on his intellect had redoubled since the Tiste Edur conquest – which had triggered the official formation and recognition of the Liberty Consign, an association of the wealthiest families in the Lether Empire – in ways he could never have imagined before. He would be hardpressed to explain how he found all such activities tedious or enervating. Yet that was what they had become, even as his suspicions slowly, incrementally, resolved into certainties; even as he began to perceive that, somewhere out there, there was an enemy – or enemies – bent on
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the singular task of economic sabotage. Not mere embezzlement, an activity with which he was personally very familiar, but something more profound, allencompassing. An enemy. To all that sustained Rautos Hivanar, and the Liberty Consign of which he was Master; indeed, to all that sustained the empire itself, regardless of who sat upon the throne, regardless even of those savage, miserable barbarians who were now preening at the very pinnacle of Letherii society, like grey-feathered jackdaws atop a hoard of baubles.
Such comprehension, on Rautos Hivanar’s part, would once have triggered a most zealous response within him. The threat alone should have sufficed to elicit a vigorous hunt, and the notion of an agency of such diabolical purpose – one, he was forced to admit, guided by the most subtle genius – should have enlivened the game until its pursuit acquired the power of obsession.
Instead, Rautos Hivanar found himself seeking notations among the dusty ledgers for evidence of past floodings, pursuing an altogether more mundane mystery that would interest but a handful of muttering academics. And that, he admitted often to himself, was odd. Nonetheless, the compulsion gathered strength, and at night he would lie beside the recumbent, sweat-sheathed mass that was his wife of thirty-three years and find his thoughts working ceaselessly, struggling against the currents of time’s cyclical flow, seeking to clamber his way back, with all his sensibilities, into past ages. Looking. Looking for something...
Sighing, Rautos set down the empty cup, then rose.
As he walked to the door, Venitt Sathad – whose family line had been Indebted to the Hivanars for six generations now – stepped forward to retrieve the fragile cup, then set off in his master’s wake.
Out onto the waterfront enclosure, across the mosaic portraying the investiture of Skoval Hivanar as Imperial Ceda three centuries past, then down the shallow stone stairs to what, in drier times, was the lower terrace garden.
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But the river’s currents had swirled in here, stealing away soil and plants, exposing a most peculiar arrangement of boulders set like a cobbled street, framed in wooden posts arranged in a rectangle, the posts little more than rotted stumps now, rising from the flood’s remnant pools.
At the edge of the upper level, workers, under Rautos’s direction, had used wood bulwarks to keep it from collapsing, and to one side sat a wheelbarrow filled with the multitude of curious objects that had been exposed by the floodwaters. These items had littered the cobbled floor.
In all, Rautos mused, a mystery. There was no record whatsoever of the lower terrace garden’s being anything but what it was, and the notations from the garden’s designer –from shortly after the completion of the estate’s main buildings – indicated the bank at that level was nothing more than ancient flood silts.
The clay had preserved the wood, at least until recently, so there was no telling how long ago the strange construct had been built. The only indication of its antiquity rested with the objects, all of which were either bronze or copper. Not weapons, as one might find associated with a barrow, and if tools, then they were for activities long forgotten, since not a single worker Rautos had brought to this place was able to fathom the function of these items – they resembled no known tools, not for stone working, nor wood, nor the processing of foodstuffs.
Rautos collected one and examined it, for at least the hundredth time. Bronze, clay-cast – the flange was clearly visible – the item was long, roundish, yet bent at almost right angles. Incisions formed a cross-hatched pattern about the elbow. Neither end displayed any means of attachment – not intended, therefore, as part of some larger mechanism. He hefted its considerable weight in his hand. There was something imbalanced about it, despite the centrally placed bend. He set it down and drew out a circular sheet of copper, thinner than the wax layer on a scrier’s tablet. Blackened by contact with the clays, yet
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only now the edges showing signs of verdigris. Countless holes had been punched through the sheet, in no particular pattern, yet each hole was perfectly uniform, perfectly round, with no lip to indicate from which side it had been punched.
‘Venitt,’ he said, ‘have we a map recording the precise locations of these objects when they were originally found?’
‘Indeed, Master, with but a few exceptions. You examined it a week past.’
‘I did? Very well. Set it out once more on the table in the library, this afternoon.’
Both men turned as the gate watcher appeared from the narrow side passage along the left side of the house. The woman halted ten paces from Rautos and bowed. ‘Master, a message from Invigilator Karos Invictad.’
‘Very good,’ Rautos replied distractedly. ‘I will attend to it in a moment. Does the messenger await a response?’
‘Yes, Master. He is in the courtyard.’
‘See that refreshments are provided.’
The watcher bowed then departed.
‘Venitt, I believe you must prepare to undertake a journey on my behalf.’
‘Master?’
‘The Invigilator at last perceives the magnitude of the threat.’
Venitt Sathad said nothing.
‘You must travel to Drene City,’ Rautos said, his eyes once more on the mysterious construct dominating the lower terrace. ‘The Consign requires a most specific report of the preparations there. Alas, the Factor’s own missives are proving unsatisfactory. I require confidence in those matters, if I am to apply fullest concentration to the threat closer to hand.’
Again, Venitt did not speak.
Rautos looked out onto the river. Fisher boats gathered in the bay opposite, two merchant traders drawing in towards the main docks. One of them, bearing the flag of
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the Esterrict family, looked damaged, possibly by fire. Rautos brushed the dirt from his hands and turned about, making his way back into the building, his servant falling into step behind him.
‘I wonder, what lies beneath those stones?’
‘Master?’
‘Never mind, Venitt. I was but thinking out loud.’
The Awl’dan camp had been attacked at dawn by two troops of Atri-Preda Bivatt’s Bluerose cavalry. Two hundred skilled lancers riding into a maelstrom of panic, as figures struggled out from the hide huts, as the Drene-bred wardogs, arriving moments before the horse-soldiers, closed on the pack of Awl herder and dray dogs, and in moments the three breeds of beast were locked in a vicious battle.
The Awl warriors were unprepared, and few had time to even so much as find their weapons before the lancers burst into their midst. In moments, the slaughter extended out to encompass elders and children. Most of the women fought alongside their male kin – wife and husband, sister and brother, dying together in a last blending of blood.
The engagement between the Letherii and the Awl took all of two hundred heartbeats. The war among the dogs was farmore protracted, for the herder dogs – while smaller and more compact than their attackers – were quick and no less vicious, while the drays, bred to pull carts in summer and sleds in winter, were comparable with the Drene breed. Trained to kill wolves, the drays proved more than a match for the wardogs, and if not for the lancers then making sport of killing the mottle-skinned beasts, the battle would have turned. As it was, the Awl pack finally broke away, the survivors fleeing onto the plain, eastward, a few Drene wardogs giving chase before being recalled by their handlers.
Whilst lancers dismounted to make certain there were no survivors among the Awl, others rode out to collect the herds of myrid and rodara in the next valley.
Atri-Preda Bivatt sat astride her stallion, struggling to
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control the beast with the smell of blood so heavy in the morning air. Beside her, sitting awkward and in discomfort on the unfamiliar saddle, Brohl Handar, the newly appointed Tiste Edur Overseer of Drene City, watched the Letherii systematically loot the encampment, stripping corpses naked and drawing their knives. The Awl bound their jewellery –mostly gold – deep in the braids of their hair, forcing the Letherii to slice away those sections of the scalp to claim their booty. Of course, there was more than just expedience in this mutilation, for it had been extended to the collecting of swaths of skin that had been decorated in tattoos, the particular style of the Awl rich in colour and often outlined in stitched gold thread. These trophies adorned the roundshields of many lancers.
The captured herds now belonged to the Factor of Drene, Letur Anict, and as Brohl Handar watched the hundreds of myrid come over the hill, their black woolly coats making them look like boulders as they poured down the hillside, it was clear that the Factor’s wealth had just risen substantially. The taller rodara followed, blue-backed and long-necked, their long tails thrashing about in nearpanic as wardogs on the herd’s flanks plunged into feint attacks again and again.
The breath hissed from the Atri-Preda’s teeth. ‘Where is the Factor’s man, anyway? Those damned rodara are going to stampede. Lieutenant! Get the handlers to call off their hounds! Hurry!’ The woman unstrapped her helm, pulled it free and set it atop the saddle horn. She looked across at Brohl. ‘There you have it, Overseer.’
‘So these are the Awl.’
She grimaced, looked away. ‘A small camp by their standards. Seventy-odd adults.’
‘Yet, large herds.’
Her grimace became a scowl. ‘They were once larger, Overseer. Much larger.’
‘I take it then that this campaign of yours is succeeding in driving away these trespassers.’
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‘Not my campaign.’ She seemed to catch something in his expression for she added, ‘Yes, of course, I command the expeditionary forces, Overseer. But I receive my orders from the Factor. And, strictly speaking, the Awl are not trespassers.’
‘The Factor claims otherwise.’
‘Letur Anict is highly ranked in the Liberty Consign.’ Brohl Handar studied the woman for a moment, then said, ‘Not all wars are fought for wealth and land, Atri-Preda.’
‘I must disagree, Overseer. Did not you Tiste Edur invade pre-emptively, in response to the perceived threat of lost land and resources? Cultural assimilation, the end of your independence. There is no doubt in my mind,’ she continued, ‘that we Letherii sought to obliterate your civilization, as we had done already with the Tarthenal and so many others. And so, an economic war.’
‘It does not surprise me, Atri-Preda, that your kind saw it that way. And I do not doubt that such concerns were present in the mind of the Warlock King. Did we conquer you in order to survive? Perhaps.’ Brohl considered saying more, then he shook his head, watching as four wardogs closed on a wounded cattle dog. The lame beast fought back, but was soon down, kicking, then silent and limp as the wardogs tore open its belly.
Bivatt asked, ‘Do you ever wonder, Overseer, which of us truly won that war?’
He shot her a dark look. ‘No, I do not. Your scouts have found no other signs of Awl in this area, I understand. So now the Factor will consolidate the Letherii claim in the usual fashion?’
The Atri-Preda nodded. ‘Outposts. Forts, raised roads. Settlers will follow.’
‘And then, the Factor will extend his covetous intentions, yet further east.’
‘As you say, Overseer. Of course, I am sure you recognize the acquisitions gift the Tiste Edur as well. The empire’s
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territory expands. I am certain the Emperor will be pleased.’
This was Brohl Handar’s second week as governor of Drene. There were few Tiste Edur in this remote corner of Rhulad’s empire, less than a hundred, and only his three staff members were from Brohl’s own tribe, the Arapay. The annexation of Awl’dan by what amounted to wholesale genocide had begun years ago – long before the Edur conquest – and the particulars of rule in far Letheras seemed to have little relevance to this military campaign. Brohl Handar, the patriarch of a clan devoted to hunting tusked seals, wondered – not for the first time – what he was doing here.
Titular command as Overseer seemed to involve little more than observation. The true power of rule was with Letur Anict, the Factor of Drene, who ‘is highly ranked in the Liberty Consign’. Some kind of guild of merchants, he had learned, although he had no idea what, precisely, was liberating about this mysterious organization. Unless, of course, it was the freedom to do as they pleased. Including the use of imperial troops to aid in the acquisition of ever more wealth.
‘Atri-Preda.’
‘Yes, Overseer?’
‘These Awl – do they fight back? No, not as they did today. I mean, do they mount raids? Do they mass their warriors on the path to all-out war?’
She looked uncomfortable. ‘Overseer, there are two ... well, levels, to this.’
‘Levels. What does that mean?’
‘Official and ... unofficial. It is a matter of perception.’
‘Explain.’
‘The belief of the common folk, as promulgated through imperial agents, is that the Awl have allied themselves with the Ak’ryn to the south, as well as the D’rhasilhani and the two kingdoms of Bolkando and Saphinand – in short, all the territories bordering the empire – creating a belligerent, warmongering and potentially overwhelming force – the
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Horde of the Bolkando Conspiracy – that threatens the entire eastern territories of the Lether Empire. It is only a matter of time before that horde is fully assembled, whereupon it will march. Accordingly, every attack launched by the Letherii military serves to diminish the numbers the Awl can contribute, and furthermore, the loss of valuable livestock in turn weakens the savages. Famine may well manage what swords alone cannot – the entire collapse of the Awl.’
‘I see. And the unofficial version?’
She glanced across at him. ‘There is no conspiracy, Overseer. No alliance. The truth is, the Awl continue to fight among themselves – their grazing land is shrinking, after all. And they despise the Ak’ryn and the D’rhasilhani, and have probably never met anyone from Bolkando or Saphinand.’ She hesitated, then said, ‘We did clash with a mercenary company of some sort, two months past – the disastrous battle that spurred your appointment, I suspect. They numbered perhaps seven hundred, and after a halfdozen skirmishes I led a force of six thousand Letherii in pursuit. Overseer, we lost almost three thousand soldiers in that final battle. If not for our mages...’ She shook her head. ‘And we still have no idea who they were.’
Brohl studied the woman. He had known nothing about any such clash. The reason for his appointment? Perhaps. ‘The official version you spoke of earlier – the lie – justifies the slaughter of the Awl, in the eyes of the commonry. All of which well serves the Factor’s desire to make himself yet richer. I see. Tell me, Atri-Preda, why does Letur Anict need all that gold? What does he do with it?’
The woman shrugged. ‘Gold is power.’
‘Power over whom?’
‘Anyone, and everyone.’
‘Excepting the Tiste Edur, who are indifferent to the Letherii idea of wealth.’
She smiled. ‘Are you, Overseer? Still?’
‘What do you mean?’
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‘There are Hiroth in Drene – yes, you have met them. Each claims kinship with the Emperor, and upon that claim they have commandeered the finest estates and land. They have hundreds of Indebted as slaves. Soon, perhaps, there will be Tiste Edur among the membership of the Liberty Consign.’
Brohl Handar frowned. On a distant ridge stood three Awl dogs, two drays and one smaller cattle dog, watching as the herds were driven through the destroyed encampment – the livestock bawling in the stench of spilled blood and wastes. He studied the three silhouettes on the ridge. Where would they go now, he wondered. ‘I have seen enough.’ He tugged his horse round, too tight on the reins, and the beast’s head snapped up and it snorted, backing as it turned. Brohl struggled to keep his balance.
If the Atri-Preda was amused she was wise enough not to show it.
In the sky overhead, the first carrion birds had appeared.
The South Jasp River, one of the four tributaries of Lether River leading down from the Bluerose Mountains, was flanked on its south bank by a raised road that, a short distance ahead, began its long climb to the mountain pass, beyond which lay the ancient kingdom of Bluerose, now subject to the Letherii Empire. The South Jasp ran fast here, the momentum of its savage descent from the mountains not yet slowed by the vast plain it now found itself crossing. The icy water pounded over huge boulders left behind by long-extinct glaciers, flinging bitter-cold mist into the air that drifted in clouds over the road.
The lone figure awaiting the six Tiste Edur warriors and their entourage was if anything taller than any Edur, yet thin, wrapped in a black sealskin cloak, hood raised. Two baldrics criss-crossed its chest, from which hung two Letherii longswords, and the few wisps of long white hair that had pulled free in the wind were now wet, adhering to the collar of the cloak.
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To the approaching Merude Edur, the face within that cowl looked pallid as death, as if a corpse had just dragged itself free of the numbing river, something long frozen in the white-veined reaches of the mountains that awaited them.
The lead warrior, a veteran of the conquest of Letheras, gestured for his comrades to halt then set out to speak to the stranger. In addition to the other five Edur, there were ten Letherii soldiers, two burdened wagons, and forty slaves shackled one to the next in a line behind the second wagon.
‘Do you wish company,’ the Merude asked, squinting to see more of that shadowed face, ‘for the climb to the pass? It’s said there remain bandits and renegades in the heights beyond.’
‘I am my own company.’
The voice was rough, the accent archaic.
The Merude halted three paces away. He could see more of that face, now. Edur features, more or less, yet white as snow. The eyes were ... unnerving. Red as blood. ‘Then why do you block our path?’
‘You captured two Letherii two days back. They are mine.’
The Merude shrugged. ‘Then you should have kept them chained at night, friend. These Indebted will run at any opportunity. Fortunate for you that we captured them. Oh, yes – of course I will return them into your care. At least the girl – the man is an escaped slave from the Hiroth, or so his tattoos reveal. A Drowning awaits him, alas, but I will consider offering you a replacement. In any case, the girl, young as she is, is valuable. I trust you can manage the cost of retrieving her.’
‘I will take them both. And pay you nothing.’
Frowning, the Merude said, ‘You were careless in losing them. We were diligent in recapturing them. Accordingly, we expect compensation for our efforts, just as you should expect a certain cost for your carelessness.’
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‘Unchain them,’ the stranger said.
‘No. What tribe are you?’ The eyes, still fixed unwavering upon his own, looked profoundly ... dead. ‘What has happened to your skin?’ As dead as the Emperor’s. ‘What is your name?’
‘Unchain them now.’
The Merude shook his head, then he laughed – a little weakly – and waved his comrades forward as he began drawing his cutlass.
Disbelief at the absurdity of the challenge slowed his effort. The weapon was halfway out of its scabbard when one of the stranger’s longswords flashed clear of its sheath and opened the Edur’s throat.
Shouting in rage, the other five warriors drew their blades and rushed forward, while the ten Letherii soldiers quickly followed suit.
The stranger watched the leader crumple to the ground, blood spurting wild into the river mist descending onto the road. Then he unsheathed his other longsword and stepped to meet the five Edur. A clash of iron, and all at once the two Letherii weapons in the stranger’s hands were singing, a rising timbre with every blow they absorbed.
Two Edur stumbled back at the same time, both mortally wounded, one in the chest, the other with a third of his skull sliced away. This latter one turned away as the fighting continued, reaching down to collect the fragment of scalp and bone, then walked drunkenly back along the road.
Another Edur fell, his left leg cut out from beneath him. The remaining two quickly backed away, yelling at the Letherii who were now hesitating three paces behind the fight.
The stranger pressed forward. He parried a thrust from the Edur on the right with the longsword in his left hand –sliding the blade under then over, drawing it leftward before a twist of his wrist tore the weapon from the attacker’s hand; then a straight-arm thrust of his own buried his point in the Edur’s throat. At the same time he
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reached over with the longsword in his right hand, feinting high. The last Edur leaned back to avoid that probe, attempting a slash aimed at clipping the stranger’s wrist. But the longsword then deftly dipped, batting the cutlass away, even as the point drove up into the warrior’s right eye socket, breaking the delicate orbital bones on its way into the forebrain.
Advancing between the two falling Edur, the stranger cut down the nearest two Letherii – at which point the remaining eight broke and ran, past the wagons – where the drivers were themselves scrambling in panicked abandonment – and then alongside the row of staring prisoners. Running, flinging weapons away, down the road.
As one Letherii in particular moved opposite one of the slaves, a leg kicked out, tripping the man, and it seemed the chain-line writhed then, as the ambushing slave leapt atop the hapless Letherii, loose chain wrapping round the neck, before the slave pulled it taut. Legs kicked, arms thrashed and hands clawed, but the slave would not relent, and eventually the guard’s struggles ceased.
Silchas Ruin, the swords keening in his hands, walked up to where Udinaas continued strangling the corpse. ‘You can stop now,’ the albino Tiste Andii said.
‘I can,’ Udinaas said through clenched teeth, ‘but I won’t. This bastard was the worst of them. The worst.’
‘His soul even now drowns in the mist,’ Silchas Ruin said, turning as two figures emerged from the brush lining the ditch on the south side of the road.
‘Keep choking him,’ said Kettle, from where she was chained farther down the line. ‘He hurt me, that one.’
‘I know,’ Udinaas said in a grating voice. ‘I know.’
Silchas Ruin approached Kettle. ‘Hurt you. How?’
‘The usual way,’ she replied. ‘With the thing between his legs.’
‘And the other Letherii?’
The girl shook her head. ‘They just watched. Laughing, always laughing.’
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Silchas Ruin turned as Seren Pedac arrived.
Seren was chilled by the look in the Tiste Andii’s uncanny eyes as Silchas Ruin said, ‘I will pursue the ones who flee, Acquitor. And rejoin you all before day’s end.’
She looked away, her gaze catching a momentary glimpse of Fear Sengar, standing over the corpses of the Merude Tiste Edur, then quickly on, to the rock-littered plain to the south – where still wandered the Tiste Edur who’d lost a third of his skull. But that sight as well proved too poignant. ‘Very well,’ she said, now squinting at the wagons and the horses standing in their yokes. ‘We will continue on this road.’
Udinaas had finally expended his rage on the Letherii body beneath him, and he rose to face her. ‘Seren Pedac, what of the rest of these slaves? We must free them all.’
She frowned. Exhaustion was making thinking difficult. Months and months of hiding, fleeing, eluding both Edur and Letherii; of finding their efforts to head eastward blocked again and again, forcing them ever northward, and the endless terror that lived within her, had driven all acuity from her thoughts. Free them. Yes. But then ...
‘Just more rumours,’ Udinaas said, as if reading her mind, as if finding her thoughts before she did. ‘There’s plenty of those, confusing our hunters. Listen, Seren, they already know where we are, more or less. And these slaves – they’ll do whatever they can to avoid recapture. We need not worry overmuch about them.’
She raised her brows. ‘You vouch for your fellow Indebted, Udinaas? All of whom will turn away from a chance to buy their way clear with vital information, yes?’
‘The only alternative, then,’ he said, eyeing her, ‘is to kill them all.’
The ones listening, the ones not yet beaten down into mindless automatons, suddenly raised their voices in proclamations and promises, reaching out towards Seren, chains rattling. The others looked up in fear, like myrid
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catching scent of a wolf they could not see. Some cried out, cowering in the stony mud of the road.
‘The first Edur he killed,’ said Udinaas, ‘has the keys.’
Silchas Ruin had walked down the road. Barely visible in the mist, the Tiste Andii veered into something huge, winged, then took to the air. Seren glanced over at the row of slaves – none had seen that, she was relieved to note. ‘Very well,’ she said in answer to Udinaas, and she walked up to where Fear Sengar still stood near the dead Edur.
‘I must take the keys,’ she said, crouching beside the first fallen Edur.
‘Do not touch him,’ Fear said.
She looked up at him. ‘The keys – the chains—’
‘I will find them,’ he said.
Nodding, she straightened, then stepped back. Watched as he spoke a silent prayer, then settled onto his knees beside the body. He found the keys in a leather pouch tied to the warrior’s belt, a pouch that also contained a handful of polished stones. Fear took the keys in his left hand and held the stones in the palm of his right. ‘These,’ he said, ‘are from the Merude shore. Likely he collected them when but a child.’
‘Children grow up,’ Seren said. ‘Even straight trees spawn crooked branches.’
‘And what was flawed in this warrior?’ Fear demanded, glaring up at her. ‘He followed my brother, as did every other warrior of the tribes.’
‘Some eventually turned away, Fear.’ Like you.
‘What I have turned away from lies in the shadow of what I am now turned towards, Acquitor. Does this challenge my loyalty towards the Tiste Edur? My own kind? No. That is something all of you forget, conveniently so, again and again. Understand me, Acquitor. I will hide if I must, but I will not kill my own people. We had the coin, we could have bought their freedom—’
‘Not Udinaas.’
He bared his teeth, said nothing.
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Yes, Udinaas, the one man you dream of killing. If not for Silchas Ruin ... ‘Fear Sengar,’ she said. ‘You have chosen to travel with us, and there can be no doubt – none at all –that Silchas Ruin commands this meagre party. Dislike his methods if you must, but he alone will see you through. You know this.’
The Hiroth warrior looked away, back down the road, blinking the water from his eyes. ‘And with each step, the cost of my quest becomes greater – an indebtedness you should well understand, Acquitor. The Letherii way of living, the burdens you can never escape. Nor purchase your way clear.’
She reached out for the keys.
He set them into her hand, unwilling to meet her eyes.
We’re no different from those slaves. She hefted the weight of the jangling iron in her hand. Chained together. Yet ... who holds the means of our release?
‘Where has he gone?’ Fear asked.
‘To hunt down the Letherii. I trust you do not object to that.’
‘No, but you should, Acquitor.’
I suppose I should at that. She set off to where waited the slaves.
A prisoner near Udinaas had crawled close to him, and Seren heard his whispered question: ‘That tall slayer – was that the White Crow? He was, wasn’t he? I have heard—’
‘You have heard nothing,’ Udinaas said, raising his arms as Seren approached. ‘The three-edged one,’ he said to her. ‘Yes, that one. Errant take us, you took your time.’
She worked the key until the first shackle clicked open. ‘You two were supposed to be stealing from a farm – not getting rounded up by slave-trackers.’
‘Trackers camped on the damned grounds – no-one was smiling on us that night.’
She opened the other shackle and Udinaas stepped out from the line, rubbing at the red weals round his wrists. Seren said, ‘Fear sought to dissuade Silchas – you know, if
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those two are any indication, it’s no wonder the Edur and the Andii fought ten thousand wars.’
Udinaas grunted as the two made their way to where stood Kettle. ‘Fear resents his loss of command,’ he said. ‘That it is to a Tiste Andii just makes it worse. He’s still not convinced the betrayal was the other way round all those centuries back; that it was Scabandari who first drew the knife.’
Seren Pedac said nothing. As she moved in front of Kettle she looked down at the girl’s dirt-smeared face, the ancient eyes slowly lifting to meet her own.
Kettle smiled. ‘I missed you.’
‘How badly were you used?’ Seren asked as she removed the large iron shackles.
‘I can walk. And the bleeding’s stopped. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?’
‘Probably.’ But this talk of rape was unwelcome – Seren had her own memories haunting her every waking moment. ‘There will be scars, Kettle.’
‘Being alive is hard. I’m always hungry, and my feet hurt.’
I hate children with secrets – especially ones with secrets they’re not even aware of. Find the right questions; there’s no other way of doing this. ‘What else bothers you about being among the living again, Kettle?’ And ... how? Why?
‘Feeling small.’
Seren’s right arm was plucked by a slave, an old man who reached out for the keys with pathetic hope in his eyes. She handed them to him. ‘Free the others,’ she said. He nodded vigorously, scrabbling at his shackles. ‘Now,’ Seren said to Kettle, ‘that’s a feeling we all must accept. Too much of the world defies our efforts to conform to what would please us. To live is to know dissatisfaction and frustration.’
‘I still want to tear out throats, Seren. Is that bad? I think it must be.’
At Kettle’s words, the old man shrank away, redoubling his clumsy attempts at releasing himself. Behind him a woman cursed with impatience.
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Udinaas had climbed onto the bed of the lead wagon and was busy looting it for whatever they might need. Kettle scrambled to join him.
‘We need to move out of this mist,’ Seren muttered. ‘I’m soaked through.’ She walked towards the wagon. ‘Hurry up with that, you two. If more company finds us here, we could be in trouble.’ Especially now that Silchas Ruin is gone. The Tiste Andii had been the singular reason for their survival thus far. When hiding and evading the searchers failed, his two swords found voice, the eerie song of obliteration. The White Crow.
It had been a week since they last caught sight of Edur and Letherii who were clearly hunters. Seeking the traitor, Fear Sengar. Seeking the betrayer, Udinaas. Yet Seren Pedac was bemused – there should have been entire armies chasing them. While the pursuit was persistent, it was dogged rather than ferocious in its execution. Silchas had mentioned, once, in passing, that the Emperor’s K’risnan were working ritual sorceries, the kind that sought to lure and trap. And that snares awaited them to the east, and round Letheras itself. She could understand those to the east, for it was the wild lands beyond the empire that had been their destination all along, where Fear – for some reason he did not care to explain – believed he would find what he sought; a belief that Silchas Ruin did not refute. But to surround the capital city itself baffled Seren. As if Rhulad is frightened of his brother.
Udinaas leapt down from the lead wagon and made his way to the second one. ‘I found coin,’ he said. ‘Lots. We should take these horses, too – we can sell them once we’re down the other side of the pass.’
‘There is a fort at the pass,’ Seren said. ‘It may be ungarrisoned, but there’s no guarantee of that, Udinaas. If we arrive with horses – and they recognize them...’
‘We go round that fort,’ he replied. ‘At night. Unseen.’ She frowned, wiped water from her eyes. ‘Easier done without horses. Besides, these beasts are old, too broken –
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they won’t earn us much, especially in Bluerose. And when Wyval returns they’ll probably die of terror.’
‘Wyval’s not coming back,’ Udinaas said, turning away, his voice grating. ‘Wyval’s gone, and that’s that.’
She knew she should not doubt him. The dragon-spawn’s spirit had dwelt within him, after all. Yet there was no obvious explanation for the winged beast’s sudden disappearance, at least none that Udinaas would share. Wyval had been gone for over a month.
Udinaas swore from where he crouched atop the bed of the wagon. ‘Nothing here but weapons.’
‘Weapons?’
‘Swords, shields and armour.’
‘Letherii?’
‘Yes. Middling quality.’
‘What were these slavers doing with a wagon load of weapons?’
Shrugging, he climbed back down, hurried past her and began unhitching the horses. ‘These beasts would’ve had a hard time on the ascent.’
‘Silchas Ruin is coming back,’ Kettle said, pointing down the road.
‘That was fast.’
Udinaas laughed harshly, then said, ‘The fools should have scattered, made him hunt each one down separately. Instead, they probably regrouped, like the stupid good soldiers they were.’
From near the front wagon, Fear Sengar spoke. ‘Your blood is very thin, Udinaas, isn’t it?’
‘Like water,’ the ex-slave replied.
For Errant’s sake, Fear, he did not choose to abandon your brother. You know that. Nor is he responsible for Rhulad’s madness. So how much of your hatred for Udinaas comes from guilt? Who truly is to blame for Rhulad? For the Emperor of a Thousand Deaths?
The white-skinned Tiste Andii strode from the mists, an apparition, his black cloak glistening like snakeskin.
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Swords sheathed once more, muting their cries – iron voices reluctant to fade, they would persist for days, now.
How she hated that sound.
Tanal Yathvanar stood looking down at the naked woman on his bed. The questioners had worked hard on her, seeking the answers they wanted. She was badly broken, her skin cut and burned, her joints swollen and mottled with bruises. She had been barely conscious when he’d used her last night. This was easier than whores, and cost him nothing besides. He wasn’t much interested in beating his women, just in seeing them beaten. He understood his desire was perversion, but this organization – the Patriotists – was the perfect haven for people like him. Power and immunity, a most deadly combination. He suspected that Karos Invictad was well aware of Tanal’s nightly escapades, and held that knowledge like a sheathed knife.
It’s not as if I’ve killed her. It’s not as if she’ll even remember this. She’s destined for the Drownings in any case – what matter if I take some pleasure first? Soldiers do the same. He had dreamed of being a soldier once, years ago, when in his youth he had held to misguided, romantic notions of heroism and unconstrained freedom, as if the first justified the second. There had been many noble killers in the history of Lether. Gerun Eberict had been such a man. He’d murdered thousands – thieves, thugs and wastrels, the depraved and the destitute. He had cleansed the streets of Letheras, and who had not indulged in the rewards? Fewer beggars, fewer pickpockets, fewer homeless and all the other decrepit failures of the modern age. Tanal admired Gerun Eberict – he had been a great man. Murdered by a thug, his skull crushed to pulp – a tragic loss, senseless and cruel.
One day we shall find that killer.
He turned away from the unconscious woman, adjusted his light tunic so that the shoulder seams were even and straight, then closed the clasps of his weapon belt. One of the Invigilator’s requirements for all officers of the
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Patriotists: belt, dagger and shortsword. Tanal liked the weight of them, the authority implicit in the privilege of wearing arms where all other Letherii – barring soldiers –were forbidden by proclamation of the Emperor.
As if we might rebel. The damned fool thinks he won that war. They all do. Dimwitted barbarians.
Tanal Yathvanar walked to the door, stepped out into the corridor, and made his way towards the Invigilator’s office. The second bell after midday sounded a moment before he knocked on the door. A murmured invitation bade him enter.
He found Rautos Hivanar, Master of the Liberty Consign, already seated opposite Karos Invictad. The large man seemed to fill half the room, and Tanal noted that the Invigilator had pushed his own chair as far back as possible, so that it was tilted against the sill of the window. In this space on his side of the desk, Karos attempted a posture of affable comfort.
‘Tanal, our guest is being most insistent with respect to his suspicions. Sufficient to convince me that we must devote considerable attention to finding the source of the threat.’
‘Invigilator, is the intent sedition or treason, or are we dealing with a thief?’
‘A thief, I should think,’ Karos replied, glancing over at Rautos Hivanar.
The man’s cheeks bulged, before he released a slow sigh. ‘I am not so sure. On the surface, we appear to be facing an obsessive individual, consumed by greed and, accordingly, hoarding wealth. But only as actual coin, and this is why it is proving so difficult to find a trail. No properties, no ostentation, no flouting of privilege. Now, as subtle consequence, the shortage of coin is finally noticeable. True, no actual damage to the empire’s financial structure has occurred. Yet. But, if the depletion continues,’ he shook his head, ‘we will begin to feel the strain.’
Tanal cleared his throat, then asked, ‘Master, have you
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assigned agents of your own to investigate the situation?’
Rautos frowned. ‘The Liberty Consign thrives precisely because its members hold to the conviction of being the most powerful players in an unassailable system. Confidence is a most fragile quality, Tanal Yathvanar. Granted, a few who deal specifically in finances have brought to me their concerns. Druz Thennict, Barrakta Ilk, for example. But there is nothing as yet formalized – no true suspicion that something is awry. Neither man is a fool, however.’ He glanced out of the window behind Karos Invictad. ‘The investigation must be conducted by the Patriotists, in utmost secrecy.’ The heavy-lidded eyes lowered, settling on the Invigilator. ‘I understand that you have been targeting academics and scholars of late.’
A modest shrug and lift of the brows from Karos Invictad. ‘The many paths of treason.’
‘Some are members of established and respected families in Lether.’
‘No, Rautos, not the ones we have arrested.’
‘True, but those unfortunate victims have friends, Invigilator, who have in turn appealed to me.’
‘Well, my friend, this is delicate indeed. You tread now on the thinnest skin of ground, with naught but mud beneath.’ He sat forward, folding his hands on the desk. ‘But I shall look into it nonetheless. Perhaps the recent spate of arrests has succeeded in quelling the disenchantment among the learned, or at least culled the most egregious of their lot.’
‘Thank you, Invigilator. Now, who will conduct your investigation?’
‘Why, I will attend to this personally.’
‘Venitt Sathad, my assistant who awaits in the courtyard below, can serveas liaison between your organization and myself for this week; thereafter, I will assign someone else.’
‘Very good. Weekly reports should suffice, at least to start.’
‘Agreed.’
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Rautos Hivanar rose, and after a moment Karos Invictad followed suit.
The office was suddenly very cramped, and Tanal edged back, angry at the intimidation he felt instinctively rising within him. I have nothing to fear from Rautos Hivanar. Nor Karos. I am their confidant, the both of them. They trust me.
Karos Invictad was a step behind Rautos, one hand on the man’s back as the Master opened the door. As soon as Rautos stepped into the hallway, Karos smiled and said a few last words to the man, who grunted in reply, and then the Invigilator closed the door and turned to face Tanal.
‘One of those well-respected academics is now staining your sheets, Yathvanar.’
Tanal blinked. ‘Sir, she was sentenced to the Drowning—’
‘Revoke the punishment. Get her cleaned up.’
‘Sir, it may well be that she will recall—’
‘A certain measure of restraint,’ Karos Invictad said in a cold tone, ‘is required from you, Tanal Yathvanar. Arrest some daughters of those already in chains, damn you, and have your fun with them. Am I understood?’
‘Y-yes sir. If she remembers—’
‘Then restitution will be necessary, won’t it? I trust you keep your own finances in order, Yathvanar. Now, begone from my sight.’
As Tanal closed the door behind him, he struggled to draw breath. The bastard. There was no warning off her, was there? Whose mistake was all this? Yet, you think to make me pay for it. All of it. Blade and Axe take you, Invictad, I won’t suffer alone.
I won’t.
‘Depravity holds a certain fascination, don’t you think?’
‘No.’
‘After all, the sicker the soul, the sweeter its comeuppance.’
‘Assuming there is one.’
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‘There’s a centre point, I’m sure of it. And it should be dead centre, by my calculations. Perhaps the fulcrum itself is flawed.’
‘What calculations?’
‘Well, the ones I asked you to do for me, of course. Where are they?’
‘They’re on my list.’
‘And how do you calculate the order of your list?’
‘That’s not the calculation you asked for.’
‘Good point. Anyway, if he’d just hold all his legs still, we could properly test my hypothesis.’
‘He doesn’t want to, and I can see why. You’re trying to balance him at the mid-point of his body, but he’s designed to hold that part up, with all those legs.’
‘Are those formal observations? If so, make a note.’
‘On what? We had the wax slab for lunch.’
‘No wonder I feel I could swallow a cow with nary a hiccough. Look! Hah! He’s perched! Perfectly perched!’
Both men leaned in to examine Ezgara, the insect with a head at each end. Not unique, of course, there were plenty around these days, filling some arcane niche in the complicated miasma of nature, a niche that had been vacant for countless millennia. The creature’s broken-twig legs kicked out helplessly.
‘You’re torturing him,’ said Bugg, ‘with clear depravity, Tehol.’
‘It only seems that way.’
‘No, it is that way.’
‘All right, then.’ Tehol reached down and plucked the hapless insect from the fulcrum. Its heads swivelled about. ‘Anyway,’ he said as he peered closely at the creature, ‘that wasn’t the depravity I was talking about. How goes the construction business, by the way?’
‘Sinking fast.’
‘Ah. Is that an affirmation or decried destitution?’
‘We’re running out of buyers. No hard coin, and I’m done with credit, especially when it turns out the developers can’t
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sell the properties. So I’ve had to lay everyone off, including myself.’
‘When did all this happen?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Typical. I’m always the last to hear. Is Ezgara hungry, do you think?’
‘He ate more wax than you did – where do you think all the waste goes?’
‘His or mine?’
‘Master, I already know where yours goes, and if Biri ever finds out—’
‘Not another word, Bugg. Now, by my observations, and according to the notations you failed to make, Ezgara has consumed food equivalent in weight to a drowned cat. Yet he remains tiny, spry, fit, and thanks to our wax lunch today his heads no longer squeak when they swivel, which I take to be a good sign, since now we won’t be woken up a hundred times a night.’
‘Master.’
‘Yes?’
‘How do you know how much a drowned cat weighs?’
‘Selush, of course.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You must remember. Three years ago. That feral cat netted in the Rinnesict Estate, the one raping a flightless ornamental duck. It was sentenced to Drowning.’
‘A terrible demise for a cat. Yes, I remember now. The yowl heard across the city.’
‘That’s the one. Some unnamed benefactor took pity on the sodden feline corpse, paying Selush a small fortune to dress the beast for proper burial.’
‘You must be mad. Who would do that and why?’
‘For ulterior motives, obviously. I wanted to know how much a drowned cat weighs, of course. Otherwise, how valid the comparison? Descriptively, I’ve been waiting to use it for years.’
‘Three.’
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‘No, much longer. Hence my curiosity, and opportunism. Prior to that cat’s watery end, I feared voicing the comparison, which, lacking veracity on my part, would invite ridicule.’
‘You’re a tender one, aren’t you?’
‘Don’t tell anyone.’
‘Master, about those vaults.’
‘What about them?’
‘I think extensions are required.’
Tehol used the tip of his right index finger to stroke the insect’s back – or, alternatively, rub it the wrong way.
‘Already? Well, how far under the river are you right now?’
‘More than halfway.’
‘And that is how many?’
‘Vaults? Sixteen. Each one three man-heights by two.’
‘All filled?’
‘All.’
‘Oh. So presumably it’s starting to hurt.’
‘Bugg’s Construction will be the first major enterprise to collapse.’
‘And how many will it drag down with it?’
‘No telling. Three, maybe four.’
‘I thought you said there was no telling.’
‘So don’t tell anyone.’
‘Good idea. Bugg, I need you to build me a box, to very specific specifications which I’ll come up with later.’
‘A box, Master. Wood good enough?’
‘What kind of sentence is that? Would good enough.’
‘No, wood, you know, the burning kind.’
‘Yes, would that wood will do.’
‘Size?’
‘Absolutely. But no lid.’
‘Finally, you’re getting specific.’
‘I told you I would.’
‘What’s this box for, Master?’
‘I can’t tell you, alas. Not specifically. But I need it soon.’
‘About the vaults...’
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‘Make ten more, Bugg. Double the size. As for Bugg’s Construction, hold on for a while longer, amass debt, evade the creditors, keep purchasing materials and stockpiling them in storage buildings charging exorbitant rent. Oh, and embezzle all you can.’
‘I’ll lose my head.’
‘Don’t worry. Ezgara here has one to spare.’
‘Why, thank you.’
‘Doesn’t even squeak, either.’
‘That’s a relief. What are you doing now, Master?’
‘What’s it look like?’
‘You’re going back to bed.’
‘And you need to build a box, Bugg, a most clever box. Remember, though, no lid.’
‘Can I at least ask what it’s for?’
Tehol settled back on his bed, studied the blue sky overhead for a moment, then smiled over at his manservant –who just happened to be an Elder God. ‘Why, comeuppance, Bugg, what else?’
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CHAPTER TWO
The waking moment awaits us all upon a threshold or where the road turns if life is pulled, sparks like moths inward to this single sliver of time gleaming like sunlight on water, we will accrete into a mass made small, veined with fears and shot through with all that’s suddenly precious, and the now is swallowed, the weight of self a crushing immediacy, on this day, where the road turns, comes the waking moment.
Winter Reflections
Corara of Drene
The ascent to the summit began where the Letheriibuilt road ended. With the river voicing its ceaseless roar fifteen paces to their left, the roughly shaped pavestones vanished beneath a black-stoned slide at the base of a moraine. Uprooted trees reached bent and twisted arms up through the rubble, jutting limbs from which hung root tendrils, dripping water. Swaths of forest climbed the mountainside to the north, on the other side of the river, and the ragged cliffs edging the tumbling water on that side
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were verdant with moss. The opposite mountain, flanking the trail, was a stark contrast, latticed with fissures, broken, gouged and mostly treeless. In the midst of this shattered façade shadows marked out odd regularities, of line and angle; and upon the trail itself, here and there, broad worn steps had been carved, eroded by flowing water and centuries of footfalls.
Seren Pedac believed that a city had once occupied the entire mountainside, a vertical fortress carved into living stone. She could make out what she thought were large gaping windows, and possibly the fragmented ledges of balconies high up, hazy in the mists. Yet something – something huge, terrible in its monstrosity – had impacted the entire side of the mountain, obliterating most of the city in a single blow. She could almost discern the outline of that collision, yet among the screes of rubble tracking down the sundered slopes the only visible stone belonged to the mountain itself.
They stood at the base of the trail. Seren watched the lifeless eyes of the Tiste Andii slowly scan upward.
‘Well?’ she asked.
Silchas Ruin shook his head. ‘Not from my people. K’Chain Che’Malle.’
‘A victim of your war?’
He glanced across at her, as if gauging the emotion behind her question, then said, ‘Most of the mountains from which the K’Chain Che’Malle carved their sky keeps are now beneath the waves, inundated following the collapse of Omtose Phellack. The cities are cut into the stone, although only in the very earliest versions are they as you see here – open to the air rather than buried within shapeless rock.’
‘An elaboration suggesting a sudden need for self-defence.’
He nodded.
Fear Sengar had moved past them and was beginning the ascent. After a moment Udinaas and Kettle followed.
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Seren had prevailed in her insistence to leave the horses behind. In a clearing off to their right sat four wagons covered with tarps. It was clear that no such contrivance could manage this climb, and all transport from here on was by foot. As for the mass of weapons and armour the slavers had been conveying, either it would have been stashed here, awaiting a hauling crew, or the slaves would have been burdened like mules.
‘I have never made this particular crossing,’ Seren said, ‘although I have viewed this mountainside from a distance. Even then, I thought I could see evidence of reshaping. I once asked Hull Beddict about it, but he would tell me nothing. At some point, however, I think our trail takes us inside.’
‘The sorcery that destroyed this city was formidable,’ Silchas Ruin said.
‘Perhaps some natural force—’
‘No, Acquitor. Starvald Demelain. The destruction was the work of dragons. Eleint of the pure blood. At least a dozen, working in concert, a combined unleashing of their warrens. Unusual,’ he added.
‘Which part?’
‘Such a large alliance, for one. Also, the extent of their rage. I wonder what crime the K’Chain Che’Malle committed to warrant suchretaliation.’
‘I know the answer to that,’ came a sibilant whisper from behind them, and Seren turned, squinted down at the insubstantial wraith crouched there.
‘Wither. I was wondering where you had gone to.’
‘Journeys into the heart of the stone, Seren Pedac. Into the frozen blood. What was their crime, you wonder, Silchas Ruin? Why, nothing less than the assured annihilation of all existence. If extinction awaited them, then so too would all else die. Desperation, or evil spite? Perhaps neither, perhaps a terrible accident, that wounding at the centre of it all. But what do we care? We shall all be dust by then. Indifferent. Insensate.’
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Silchas Ruin said, without turning, ‘Beware the frozen blood, Wither. It can still take you.’
The wraith hissed a laugh. ‘Like an ant to sap, yes. Oh, but it is so seductive, Master.’
‘You have been warned. If you are snared, I cannot free you.’
The wraith slithered past them, flowed up the ragged steps.
Seren adjusted the leather satchel on her shoulders. ‘The Fent carried supplies balanced on their heads. Would that I could do the same.’
‘The vertebrae become compacted,’ Silchas Ruin said, ‘resulting in chronic pain.’
‘Well, mine are feeling rather crunched right now, so I’m afraid I don’t see much difference.’ She began the climb. ‘You know, as a Soletaken, you could just—’
‘No,’ he said as he followed, ‘there is too much bloodlust in the veering. The draconean hunger within me is where lives my anger, and that anger is not easily contained.’
She snorted, unable to help herself.
‘You are amused, Acquitor?’
‘Scabandari is dead. Fear has seen his shattered skull. You were stabbed and then imprisoned, and now that you are free, all that consumes you is the desire for vengeance –against what? Some incorporeal soul? Something less than a wraith? What will be left of Scabandari by now? Silchas Ruin, yours is a pathetic obsession. At least Fear Sengar seeks something positive – not that he’ll find it since you will probably annihilate what’s left of Scabandari before he gets a chance to talk to it, assuming that’s even possible.’ When he said nothing, she continued, ‘It seems I am now fated to guiding such quests. Just like my last journey, the one that took me to the lands of the Tiste Edur. Everyone at odds, motives hidden and in conflict. My task was singular, of course: deliver the fools, then stand well back as the knives are drawn.’
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‘Acquitor, my anger is more complicated than you believe.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘The future you set before us is too simple, too confined. I suspect that when we arrive at our destination, nothing will proceed as you anticipate.’
She grunted. ‘I will accept that, since it was without doubt the case in the village of the Warlock King. After all, the fallout was the conquest of the Letherii Empire.’
‘Do you take responsibility for that, Acquitor?’
‘I take responsibility for very little, Silchas Ruin. That much must be obvious.’
The steps were steep, the edges worn and treacherous. As they climbed, the air thinned, mists swirling in from the tumbling falls on their left, the sound a roar that clambered among the stones in a tumult of echoes. Where the ancient stairs vanished entirely, wooden trestles had been constructed, forming something between a ladder and steps against the sheer, angled rock.
They found a ledge a third of the way up where they could gather to rest. Among the scatter of rubble on the shelf were remnants of metopes, cornices and friezes bearing carvings too fragmented to be identifiable – suggesting that an entire façade had once existed directly above them. The scaffolding became a true ladder here, and off to the right, three man-heights up, gaped the mouth of a cave, rectangular, almost door-shaped.
Udinaas stood regarding that dark portal for a long time, before he turned to the others. ‘I suggest we try it.’
‘There is no need, slave,’ replied Fear Sengar. ‘This trail is straightforward, reliable—’
‘And getting icier the higher we go.’ The Indebted grimaced, then laughed. ‘Oh, there’re songs to be sung, are there, Fear? The perils and tribulations, the glories of suffering, all to win your heroic triumph. You want the elders who were once your grandchildren to gather the clan round the fire, for the telling of your tale, a lone warrior’s
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quest for his god. I can almost hear them now, describing the formidable Fear Sengar of the Hiroth, brother to the Emperor, with his train of followers – the lost child, the inveterate Letherii guide, a ghost, a slave and of course the white-skinned nemesis. The White Crow with his silver-tongued lies. Oh, we have here the gamut of archetypes, yes?’ He reached into the satchel beside him and drew out a waterskin, took a long drink, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘But imagine all of it going for naught, when you pitch from a slippery rung and plunge five hundred man-heights to your ignominious death. Not how the story goes, alas, but then, life isn’t a story now, is it?’ He replaced the skin and shouldered his pack. ‘The embittered slave chooses a different route to the summit, the fool. But then,’ he paused to grin back at Fear, ‘somebody has to be the moral lesson in this epic, right?’
Seren watched the man climbing the rungs. When he came opposite the cave mouth, he reached out until one hand gripped the edge of stone, then followed with a foot, stretching until the probing tip of his moccasin settled on the ledge. Then, in a swift shifting of weight, combined with a push away from the ladder, he fluidly spun on one leg, the other swinging over empty air. Then stepping inward, pulled by the weight of the satchel on his back, into the gloom of the entrance.
‘Nicely done,’ Silchas Ruin commented, and there was something like amusement in his tone, as if he had enjoyed the slave’s poking at Fear Sengar’s sententious selfimportance, thus revealing two edges to his observation. ‘I am of a mind to follow him.’
‘Me, too,’ said Kettle.
Seren Pedac sighed. ‘Very well, but I suggest we use ropes between us, and leave the showing off to Udinaas.’
The mouth of the cave revealed that it had been a corridor, probably leading out onto a balcony before the façade had sheared off. Massive sections of the walls, riven through
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with cracks, had shifted, settled at conflicting angles. And every crevasse, every fissure on all sides that Seren could see, seethed with the squirming furred bodies of bats, awakened now to their presence, chittering and moments from panic. As Seren set her pack down, Udinaas moved beside her.
‘Here,’ he said, his breath pluming, ‘light this lantern, Acquitor – when the temperature drops my hands start going numb.’ At her look he glanced over at Fear Sengar, then said, ‘Too many years reaching down into icy water. A slave among the Edur knows little comfort.’
‘You were fed,’ Fear Sengar said.
‘When a bloodwood tree toppled in the forest,’ Udinaas said, ‘we’d be sent out to drag it back to the village. Do you remember those times, Fear? Sometimes the trunk would shift unexpectedly, slide in mud or whatever, and crush a slave. One of them was from our own household – you don’t recall him, do you? What’s one more dead slave? You Edur would shout out when that happened, saying the bloodwood spirit was thirsty for Letherii blood.’
‘Enough, Udinaas,’ Seren said, finally succeeding in lighting the lantern. As the illumination burgeoned, the bats exploded from the cracks and suddenly the air was filled with frantic, beating wings. A dozen heartbeats later the creatures were gone.
She straightened, raising the lantern.
They stood on a thick mouldy paste – guano, crawling with grubs and beetles – from which rose a foul stench.
‘We’d better move in,’ Seren said, ‘and get clear of this. There are fevers...’
The man was screaming as the guards dragged him by his chains, across the courtyard to the ring-wall. His crushed feet left bloody smears on the pavestones. Screams of accusation wailed from him, shrill outrage at the shaping of the world – the Letherii world.
Tanal Yathvanar snorted softly. ‘Hear him. Such naivety.’
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Karos Invictad, standing beside him on the balcony, gave him a sharp look. ‘You foolish man, Tanal Yathvanar.’
‘Invigilator?’
Karos Invictad leaned his forearms on the railing and squinted down at the prisoner. Fingers like bloated riverworms slowly entwined. From somewhere overhead a gull was laughing. ‘Who poses the greatest threat to the empire, Yathvanar?’
‘Fanatics,’ Tanal replied after a moment. ‘Like that one below.’
‘Incorrect. Listen to his words. He is possessed of certainty. He holds to a secure vision of the world, a man with the correct answers – that the prerequisite questions were themselves the correct ones goes without saying. A citizen with certainty, Yathvanar, can be swayed, turned, can be made into a most diligent ally. All one needs to do is find what threatens them the most. Ignite their fear, burn to cinders the foundations of their certainty, then offer an equally certain alternate way of thinking, of seeing the world. They will reach across, no matter how wide the gulf, and grasp and hold on to you with all their strength. No, the certain are not our enemies. Presently misguided, as in the case of the man below, but always most vulnerable to fear. Take away the comfort of their convictions, then coax them with seemingly cogent and reasonable convictions of our own making. Their eventual embrace is assured.’
‘I see.’
‘Tanal Yathvanar, our greatest enemies are those who are without certainty. The ones with questions, the ones who regard our tidy answers with unquenchable scepticism. Those questions assail us, undermine us. They ... agitate. Understand, these dangerous citizens understand that nothing is simple; their stance is the very opposite of naivety. They are humbled by the ambivalence to which they are witness, and they defy our simple, comforting assertions of clarity, of a black and white world. Yathvanar, when you wish to deliver the gravest insult to such a 81
citizen, call them naive. You will leave them incensed; indeed, virtually speechless ... until you watch their minds back-tracking, revealed by a cascade of expressions, as they ask themselves: who is it that would call me naive? Well, comes the answer, clearly a person possessing certainty, with all the arrogance and preten sion that position entails; a confidence, then, that permits the offhand judgement, the derisive dismissal uttered from a most lofty height. And from all this, into your victim’s eyes will come the light of recognition – in you he faces his enemy, his truest enemy. And he will know fear. Indeed, terror.’
‘You invite the question, then, Invigilator...’
Karos Invictad smiled. ‘Do I possess certainty? Or am I in fact plagued by questions, doubts, do I flounder in the wild currents of complexity?’ He was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘I hold to but one certainty. Power shapes the face of the world. In itself, it is neither benign nor malicious, it is simply the tool by which its wielder reshapes all that is around him or herself, reshapes it to suit his or her own ... comforts. Of course, to express power is to enact tyranny, which can be most subtle and soft, or cruel and hard. Implicit in power – political, familial, as you like – is the threat of coercion. Against all who choose to resist. And know this: if coercion is available, it will be used.’ He gestured. ‘Listen to that man. He does my work for me. Down in the dungeons, his cellmates hear his ravings, and some among them join in chorus – the guards take note of who, and that is a list of names I peruse daily, for they are the ones I can win over. The ones who say nothing, or turn away, now that is the list of those who must die.’
‘So,’ said Tanal, ‘we let him scream.’
‘Yes. The irony is, he truly is naive, although not of course as you originally meant. It is his very certainty that reveals his blithe ignorance. It is a further irony that both extremes of the political spectrum reveal a convergence of the means and methods and indeed the very attitudes of the believers – their ferocity against naysayers, the blood
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they willingly spill for their cause, defending their version of reality. The hatred they reveal for those who voice doubts. Scepticism disguises contempt, after all, and to be held in contempt by one who holds to nothing is to feel the deepest, most cutting wound. And so we who hold to certainty, Yathvanar, soon find it our mission to root out and annihilate the questioners. And my, the pleasure we derive from that...’
Tanal Yathvanar said nothing, inundated with a storm of suspicions, none of which he could isolate, chase down.
Karos Invictad said, ‘You were so quick to judge, weren’t you? Ah, you revealed so much with that contemptuous utterance. And I admit to being amused at my own instinctive response to your words. Naive. Errant take me, I wanted to rip your head from your body, like decapitating a swamp-fly. I wanted to show you true contempt. Mine. For you and your kind. I wanted to take that dismissive expression on your face and push it through an offal grinder. You think you have all the answers? You must, given the ease of your voiced judgement. Well, you pathetic little creature, one day uncertainty will come to your door, will clamber down your throat, and it will be a race to see which arrives first, humility or death. Either way, I will spare you a moment’s compassion, which is what sets you and me apart, isn’t it? A package arrived today, yes?’
Tanal blinked. See how we all possess a bloodlust. Then he nodded. ‘Yes, Invigilator. A new puzzle for you.’
‘Excellent. From whom?’
‘Anonymous.’
‘Most curious. Is that part of the mystery, or fear of ridicule when I solve it after a mere moment’s thought? Well, how can you possibly answer that question? Where is it now?’
‘It should have been delivered to your office, sir.’
‘Good. Permit the man below to scream for the rest of the afternoon, then have him sent below again.’
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Tanal bowed as Karos left the balcony. He waited for a hundred heartbeats, then he too departed.
A short time later he descended to the lowest level of the ancient dungeons, down spiralling stone steps to corridors and cells that had not seen regular use in centuries. The recent floods had inundated both this level and the one above it, although the waters had since drained, leaving behind thick silts and the stench of stagnant, filthy water. Carrying a lantern, Tanal Yathvanar made his way down a sloping channel until he came to what had once been the primary inquisition chamber. Arcane, rust-seized mechanisms squatted on the pavestoned floor, or were affixed to walls, with one bedframe-like cage suspended from the ceiling by thick chains.
Directly opposite the entrance was a wedge-shaped contraption, replete with manacles and chains that could be drawn tight via a wall-mounted ratchet to one side. The inclined bed faced onto the chamber, and shackled to it was the woman he had been instructed to release.
She was awake, turning her face away from the sudden light.
Tanal set the lantern down on a table cluttered with instruments of torture. ‘Time for a feeding,’ he said.
She said nothing.
A well-respected academic. Look at her now. ‘All those lofty words of yours,’ Tanal said. ‘In the end, they prove less substantial than dust on the wind.’
Her voice was ragged, croaking. ‘May you one day choke on that dust, little man.’
Tanal smiled. ‘“Little”. You seek to wound me. A pathetic effort.’ He walked over to a chest against the wall to his right. It had contained vise-helms, but Tanal had removed the skull-crushers, filling the chest with flasks of water and dried foodstuffs. ‘I shall need to bring down buckets with soap-water,’ he said, drawing out the makings of her supper. ‘Unavoidable as your
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defecation is, the smell and the stains are most unpleasant.’
‘Oh, I offend you, do I?’
He glanced over at her and smiled. ‘Janath Anar, a senior lecturer in the Academy of Imperial Learning. Alas, you appear to have learned nothing of imperial ways. Although, one might argue, that has changed since your arrival here.’
She studied him, a strangely heavy look to her bruised eyes. ‘From the First Empire until this day, little man, there have been times of outright tyranny. That the present oppressors are Tiste Edur is scarely worth noting. After all, the true oppression comes from you. Letherii against Letherii. Furthermore—’
‘Furthermore,’ Tanal said, mocking her, ‘the Patriotists are the Letherii gift of mercy against their own. Better us than the Edur. We do not make indiscriminate arrests; we do not punish out of ignorance; we are not random.’
‘A gift? Do you truly believe that?’ she asked, still studying him. ‘The Edur don’t give a damn, one way or the other. Their leader is unkillable, and that makes their mastery absolute.’
‘A high-ranking Tiste Edur liaises with us almost daily—’
‘To keep you in rein. You, Tanal Yathvanar, not your prisoners. You and that madman, Karos Invictad.’ She cocked her head. ‘Why is it, I wonder, that organizations such as yours are invariably run by pitiful human failures? By small-minded psychotics and perverts. All bullied as children, of course. Or abused by twisted parents – I’m sure you have terrible tales to confess, of your miserable youth. And now the power is in your hands, and oh how the rest of us suffer.’
Tanal walked over with the food and the flask of water.
‘For Errant’s sake,’ she said, ‘loosen at least one of my arms, so I can feed myself.’
He came up beside her. ‘No, I prefer it this way. Are you humiliated, being fed like a babe?’
‘What do you want with me?’ Janath asked, as he unstoppered the flask.
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He set it to her cracked lips, watched her drink. ‘I don’t recall saying I wanted anything,’ he replied.
She twisted her head away, coughing, water spilling onto her chest. ‘I’ve confessed everything,’ she said after a moment. ‘You have all my notes, my treasonous lectures on personal responsibility and the necessity for compassion—’
‘Yes, your moral relativism.’
‘I refute any notion of relativism, little man – which you’d know had you bothered reading those notes. The structures of a culture do not circumvent nor excuse selfevident injustice or inequity. The status quo is not sacred, not an altar to paint in rivers of blood. Tradition and habit are not sound arguments—’
‘White Crow, woman, you are most certainly a lecturer. I liked you better unconscious.’
‘Best beat me senseless again,’ she said.
‘Alas, I cannot. After all, I am supposed to free you.’
Her eyes narrowed on his, then shied away again. ‘Careless of me,’ she muttered.
‘In what way?’ he asked.
‘I was almost seduced. The lure of hope. If you are supposed to free me, you would never have brought me down here. No, I’m to be your private victim, and you my private nightmare. In the end, the chains upon you will be a match to mine.’
‘The psychology of the human mind,’ Tanal said, pushing some fat-soaked bread into her mouth. ‘Your speciality. So, you can read my life as easily as you read a scroll. Is that supposed to frighten me?’
She chewed, then, with a struggle, swallowed. ‘I wield a far deadlier weapon, little man.’
‘And that would be?’
‘I slip into your head. I see through your eyes. Swim the streams of your thought. I stand there, looking at the soiled creature chained to this rape-bed. And eventually, I begin to understand you. It’s more intimate than making love, little man, because all your secrets vanish. And, in case you
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were wondering, yes, I am doing it even now. Listening to my own words as you listen, feeling the tightness gripping your chest, that odd chill beneath your skin despite the fresh sweat. The sudden fear, as you realize the extent of your vulnerability—’
He struck her. Hard enough to snap her head to one side. Blood gushed from her mouth. She coughed, spat, then spat again, her breath coming in ragged, liquid gasps. ‘We can resume this meal later,’ he said, struggling to keep his words toneless. ‘I expect you’ll do your share of screaming in the days and weeks to come, Janath, but I assure you, your cries will reach no-one.’
A peculiar hacking sound came from her.
After a moment, Tanal realized she was laughing.
‘Impressive bravado,’ he said, with sincerity. ‘Eventually, I may in truth free you. For now, I remain undecided. I’m sure you understand.’
She nodded.
‘You arrogant bitch,’ he said.
She laughed again.
He backed away. ‘Do not think I will leave the lantern,’ he snarled.
Her laughter followed him out, cutting like broken glass.
The ornate carriage, trimmed in gleaming bloodwood, was motionless, drawn up to one side of the main thoroughfare of Drene, its tall wheels straddling the open sewer. The four bone-white horses stood listless in the unseasonal heat, heads hanging down over their collars. Directly ahead of them the street was framed in an arching open gate, and beyond it was the sprawling maze of the High Market, a vast concourse crowded with stalls, carts, livestock and throngs of people.
The flow of wealth, the cacophony of voices and the multitude of proffering or grasping hands seemed to culminate in a force, battering at Brohl Handar’s senses even from where he sat, protected within the plush
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confines of the carriage. The heaving sounds from the market, the chaotic back and forth flow of people beneath the gate, and the crowds on the street itself, all made the Overseer think of religious fervour, as if he was witness to a frenzied version of a Tiste Edur funeral. In place of the women voicing their rhythmic grunts of constrained grief, drovers bullied braying beasts through the press. Instead of unblooded youths wading through blood-frothed surf pounding paddles against the waves, there was the clatter of cartwheels and the high, piping cries of hawkers. The woodsmoke of the pyres and offerings enwreathing an Edur village was, here, a thick, dusty river tainted with a thousand scents. Dung, horse piss, roasting meat, vegetables and fish, uncured myrid hides and tanned rodara skins; rotting wastes and the cloying smells of intoxicating drugs.
Here, among the Letherii, no precious offerings were thrown into the sea. Tusked seal ivory leaned against shelves like fang-rows from some wooden mechanisms of torture. In other stalls, that ivory reappeared, this time carved into a thousand shapes, many of them mimicking religious objects from the Edur, the Jheck and the Fent, or as playing pieces for a game. Polished amber was adornment, not the sacred tears of captured dusk, and bloodwood itself had been carved into bowls, cups and cooking utensils.
Or to trim an ostentatious carriage.
Through a slit in the shutters, the Overseer watched the surging to and fro on the street. An occasional Tiste Edur appeared in the crowds, a head taller than most Letherii, and Brohl thought he could read something of bemusement behind their haughty, remote expressions; and once, in the face of an overdressed, ring-speared Elder whom Brohl knew personally, he saw the glint of avarice in the Edur’s eyes.
Change was rarely chosen, and its common arrival was slow, subtle. Granted, the Letherii had experienced the shock of defeated armies, a slain king, and a new ruling
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class, but even then such sudden reversals had proved not nearly as catastrophic as one might have expected. The skein that held Lether together was resilient and, Brohl now knew, far stronger than it appeared. What disturbed him the most, however, was the ease with which that skein entwined all who found themselves in its midst.
Poison in that touch, yet not fatal, just intoxicating. Sweet, yet perhaps, ultimately, deadly. This is what comes of ... comfort. Yet, he could well see, the reward of comfort was not available to all; indeed, it seemed disturbingly rare. While those who possessed wealth clearly exulted in its display, that very ostentation underscored the fact that they were a distinct minority. But that imbalance was, he now understood, entirely necessary. Not everyone could be rich – the system would not permit such equity, for the power and privilege it offered was dependent on the very opposite. Inequity, else how can power be assessed, how can the gifts of privilege be valued? For there to be rich, there must be poor, and more of the latter than the former.
Simple rules, easily arrived at through simple observation. Brohl Handar was not a sophisticated man, a shortcoming he was reminded of every day since his arrival as Overseer of Drene. He had no particular experience with governing, and few of the skills in his possession were proving applicable to his new responsibilities.
The Factor, Letur Anict, was conducting an unofficial war against the tribes beyond the borderlands, using imperial troops to steal land and consolidate his new-found holdings. There was no real justification for this bloodshed; the goal was personal wealth. As yet, however, Brohl Handar did not know what he was going to do about it, if indeed he was going to do anything. He had prepared a long report to the Emperor, providing well-documented details describing the situation here in Drene. That report remained in Brohl’s possession, for he had begun to suspect that, should he send it off to Letheras, it would not reach the Emperor, or any of his Edur advisors. The Letherii
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Chancellor, Triban Gnol, appeared to be complicit and possibly even in league with Letur Anict – hinting at a vast web of power, hidden beneath the surface and seemingly thriving unaffected by Edur rule. At the moment, all Brohl Handar had were suspicions, hints of that insidious web of power. One link was certain, and that was with this Letherii association of wealthy families, the Liberty Consign. Possibly, this organization was at the very heart of the hidden power. But he could not be sure.
Brohl Handar, a minor noble among the Tiste Edur, and newly appointed Overseer to a small city in a remote corner of the empire, well knew that he could not challenge such a thing as the Liberty Consign. He was, indeed, beginning to believe that the Tiste Edur tribes, scattered as they had become across this vast land, were little more than flotsam riding the indifferent currents of a turgid, deep river.
Yet, there is the Emperor.
Who is quite probably insane.
He did not know to whom to turn; nor even if what he was witnessing was, in truth, as dangerous as it seemed.
Brohl was startled by a commotion near the gate and he leaned forward to set an eye against the slit between the shutters.
An arrest. People were quickly moving away from the scene as two nondescript Letherii, one to each side, pushed their victim face-first against one of the gate’s uprights. There were no shouted accusations, no frightened denials. The silence shared by the Patriotist agents and their prisoner left the Overseer strangely shaken. As if the details did not matter to any of them.
One of the agents was searching for weapons, finding none, and then, as his fellow agent held the man against the ornate upright, he removed the leather hip-satchel from the man’s belt and began rummaging through it. The prisoner’s face was pressed sideways against the bas-relief carvings on the broad, squared column, and those carvings depicted some past glory of the Letherii Empire. Brohl
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Handar suspected the irony was lost on all concerned. Sedition would be the charge. It was always the charge. But against what? Not the presence of the Tiste Edur – that would be pointless, after all, and certainly there had been virtually no attempts at reprisal, at least none that Brohl Handar had heard about. So ... what, precisely? Against whom? The Indebted always existed, and some fled their debts, but most did not. There were sects formulated around political or social disquiet, many of them drawing membership from the disenfranchised remnants of subjugated tribes – the Fent, the Nerek, Tarthenal and others. But since the conquest, most of these sects had either dissolved or fled the empire. Sedition. A charge to silence debate. Somewhere, therefore, there must exist a list of the accepted beliefs, the host of convictions and faiths that composed the proper doctrine. Or was something more insidious at work?
There was a scratch at the carriage door, and a moment later it opened.
Brohl Handar studied the figure stepping onto the runner, the carriage tilting with his weight. ‘By all means, Orbyn,’ he said, ‘enter.’
Muscle softened by years of inactivity, fleshy face, the jowls heavy and slack, Orbyn ‘Truthfinder’ seemed to sweat incessantly, regardless of ambient temperature, as if some internal pressure forced the toxins of his mind to the surface of his skin. The local head of the Patriotists was, to Brohl Handar’s eye, the most despicable, malicious creature he had ever met.
‘Your arrival is well timed,’ the Tiste Edur said as Orbyn entered the carriage and settled down on the bench opposite, the acrid smell of his sweat wafting across. ‘Although I was not aware that you personally oversee the daily activities of your agents.’
Orbyn’s thin lips creased in a smile. ‘We have stumbled on some information that might be of interest to you, Overseer.’
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‘Another one of your non-existent conspiracies?’
The smile widened momentarily, a flicker. ‘If you are referring to the Bolkando Conspiracy, alas, that one belongs to the Liberty Consign. The information we have acquired concerns your people.’
My people. ‘Very well.’ Brohl Handar waited. Outside, the two agents were dragging their prisoner away, and around them the flow of humanity resumed, furtive in their avoidance.
‘A party was sighted, west of Bluerose. Two Tiste Edur, one of them white-skinned. This latter one, I believe, has become known as the White Crow – a most disturbing title for us Letherii, by the way.’ He blinked, the lids heavy. ‘Accompanying them were three Letherii, two female and one an escaped slave with the ownership tattoos of the Hiroth tribe.’
Brohl forced himself to remain expressionless, although a tightness gripped his chest. This is none of your business. ‘Do you have more details as to their precise location?’
‘They were heading east, to the mountains. There are three passes, only two open this early in the season.’
Brohl Handar slowly nodded. ‘The Emperor’s K’risnan are also capable of determining their general whereabouts. Those passes are blocked.’ He paused, then said, ‘It is as Hannan Mosag predicted.’
Orbyn’s dark eyes studied him from between folds of fat. ‘I am reminded of Edur efficiency.’
Yes.
The man known as Truthfinder went on, ‘The Patriotists have questions regarding this white-skinned Tiste Edur, this White Crow. From which tribe does he hail?’
‘None. He is not Tiste Edur.’
‘Ah. I am surprised. The description...’
Brohl Handar said nothing.
‘Overseer, can we assist?’
‘Unnecessary at this time,’ Brohl replied.
‘I am most curious as to why you have not already closed
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in on this party and effected a capture. My sources indicate that the Tiste Edur is none other than Fear Sengar, the Emperor’s brother.’
‘As I said, the passes are blocked.’
‘Ah, then you are tightening the net even as we speak.’
Brohl Handar smiled. ‘Orbyn, you said earlier the Bolkando Conspiracy is under the purview of the Liberty Consign. By that, are you truly telling me that the Patriotists are without interest in that matter?’
‘Not at all. The Consign makes use of our network on a regular basis—’
‘For which you are no doubt rewarded.’
‘Of course.’
‘I find myself—’
Orbyn raised a hand, head cocking. ‘You will have to excuse me, Overseer. I hear alarms.’ He rose with a grunt, pushing open the carriage door.
Bemused, Brohl said nothing, watching as the Letherii left. Once the door was closed he reached to a small compartment and withdrew a woven ball filled with scented grasses, then held it to his face. A tug on a cord stirred the driver to collect up the traces. The carriage lurched as it rolled forward. Brohl could hear the alarms now, a frantic cacophony. Leaning forward, he spoke into the voice-tube. ‘Take us to those bells, driver.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘No hurry.’
The Drene Garrison commanded a full dozen stone buildings situated on a low hill north of the city centre. Armoury, stables, barracks and command headquarters were all heavily fortified, although the complex was not walled. Drene had been a city-state once, centuries past, and after a protracted war with the Awl the beleaguered king had invited Letherii troops to effect victory against the nomads. Decades later, evidence had come out that the conflict itself had been the result of Letherii manipulations. In any case, the Letherii troops had never left; the king
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accepted the title of vizier and in a succession of tragic accidents he and his entire line were wiped out. But that was history, now, the kind that was met with indifference.
Four principal avenues extended out from the garrison’s parade grounds, the one leading northward converging with the Gate Road that led to the city wall and the North Coast track – the least frequented of the three landward routes to and from the city.
In the shadows beneath the gabled balcony of a palatial estate just beyond the armoury, on the north avenue, a clear line of sight was available for the short, lithe figure standing in the cool gloom. A rough-woven hood hid the features, although had anyone bothered to pause in passing, squinting hard, they would have been startled to see the glint of crimson scales where the face should have been, and eyes hidden in black-rimmed slits. But there was something about the figure that encouraged inattention. Gazes slid past, rarely comprehending that, indeed, someone stood in those shadows.
He had positioned himself there just before dawn and it was now late afternoon. Eyes fixed on the garrison, the messengers entering and exiting the headquarters, the visitation of a half-dozen noble merchants, the purchasing of horses, scrap metal, saddles and other sundry materiel. He studied the skin hides on the round-shields of the lancers – flattened faces, the skin darkened to somewhere between purple and ochre, making the tattooing subtle and strangely beautiful.
Late afternoon, the shadows lengthening, and the figure made note of two Letherii men, passing across his field of vision for the second time. Their lack of attention seemed ... conspicuous, and some instinct told the cowled figure that it was time to leave.
As soon as they had passed by, heading up the street, westward, the figure stepped out from the shadows, walked swiftly and silently after the two men. He sensed their sudden, heightened awareness – and perhaps something
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like alarm. Moments before catching up to them, he turned right, into an alley leading north.
Fifteen paces in, he found a dark recess in which he could hide. He drew back his cloak and cinched it, freeing his arms and hands.
A dozen heartbeats passed before he heard their footfalls.
He watched them walk past, cautious, both with drawn knives. One whispered something to the other and they hesitated.
The figure allowed his right foot to scrape as he stepped forward.
They spun round.
The Awl’dan cadaran whip was a whisper as it snaked out, the leather – studded with coin-sized, dagger-sharp, overlapping half-moon blades – flickering out in a gleaming arc that licked both men across their throats. Blood sprayed.
He watched them crumple. The blood flowed freely, more from the man who had been on the left, spreading across the greasy cobbles. Stepping close to the other victim, he unsheathed a knife and plunged it point-first into his throat; then, with practised familiarity, he cut off the man’s face, taking skin, muscle and hair. He repeated the ghastly task with the other man.
Two fewer agents of the Patriotists to contend with.
Of course, they worked in threes, one always at a distance, following the first two.
From the garrison, the first alarms sounded, a shrill collection of bells that trilled out through the dusty air above the buildings.
Folding up his grisly trophies and pushing them beneath a fold in the loose rodara wool shirt that covered his scaled hauberk, the figure set off along the alley, making for the north gate.
A squad of the city guard appeared at the far mouth, five armoured, helmed Letherii with shortswords and shields.
Upon seeing them, the figure sprinted forward, freeing 95
the cadaran whip in his left hand, while in his right hand he shook free the rygtha crescent axe from the over-under strips of rawhide that had held it against his hip. A thick haft, as long as a grown man’s thigh bone, to which each end was affixed a three-quarter-moon iron blade, their planes perpendicular to each other. Cadaran and rygtha: ancient weapons of the Awl’dan, their mastery virtually unknown among the tribes for at least a century.
The constabulary had, accordingly, never before faced such weapons.
At ten paces from the first three guardsmen, the whip lashed out, a blurred sideways figure-eight that spawned screams and gouts of blood that spilled almost black in the alley’s gloom. Two of the Letherii reeled back.
The lithe, wiry figure closed on the last man in the front row. Right hand slid along the haft to run up against a flange beneath the left-side crescent blade, the haft slapping parallel to the underside of his forearm as he brought the weapon up – blocking a desperate slash from the guard’s shortsword. Then, as the Awl threw his elbow forward, the right-side blade flashed out, cutting at the man’s face, connecting just below the helm’s rim, chopping through the nasal ridge and frontal bone before dipping into the soft matter of his brain. The tapered, sharp crescent blade slid back out with ease, as the Awl slipped past the falling guard, whip returning from an over-thehead gather to hiss out, wrapping round the neck of the fourth Letherii – who shrieked, dropping his sword as he scrabbled at the deadly blades – as the Awl dropped into a crouch, his right hand sliding the length of the rygtha haft to abut the flanged base of the right-blade, then slashing out. The fifth guard jerked his shield upward to block, but too late – the blade caught him across the eyes.
A tug on the whip decapitated the fourth guard.
The Awl released his hold on the cadaran’s handle and, gripping the rygtha at both ends, stepped close to slam the haft into the last guard’s throat, crushing the windpipe.
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Collecting the whip, he moved on.
A street, the sound of lancers off to the right. The gate, fifty paces to the left, now knotted with guards – heads turning his way.
He raced straight for them.
Atri-Preda Bivatt took personal command of a troop of lancers. Twenty riders at her back, she led her horse at a canter, following the trail of a bloodbath.
The two Patriotist agents midway down the alley. Five city guardsmen at the far end.
Riding out onto the street, she angled her mount to the left, drawing her longsword as she neared the gate.
Bodies everywhere, twenty or more, and only two seemed to be still alive. Bivatt stared from beneath the rim of her helm, cold sweat prickling awake beneath her armour. Blood everywhere. On the cobbles, splashed high on the walls and the gate itself. Dismembered limbs. The stench of vacated bowels, spilled intestines. One of the survivors was screaming, head whipping back and forth. Both his hands had been sliced off.
Just beyond the gate, Bivatt saw as she reined in, four horses were down, their riders sprawled out on the road. Drifting dust indicated that the others from the first troop to arrive were riding in pursuit.
The other survivor stumbled up to her. He had taken a blow to the head, the helm dented on one side and blood flowing down that side of his face and neck. In his eyes as he stared up at her, a look of horror. He opened his mouth, but no words came forth.
Bivatt scanned the area once more, then turned to her Finadd. ‘Take the troop through, go after them. Get your weapons out, damn you!’ She glared back down at the guardsman. ‘How many were there?’
He gaped.
More guardsmen were arriving. A cutter hurried to the screaming man who had lost his hands.
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‘Did you hear my question?’ Bivatt hissed.
He nodded, then said. ‘One. One man, Atri-Preda.’
One? Ridiculous. ‘Describe him!’
‘Scales – his face was scales. Red as blood!’
A rider from her troop returned from the road. ‘The first troop of lancers are all dead, Atri-Preda,’ he said, his tone high and pinched. ‘Further down the road. All the horses but one – sir, should we follow?’
‘Should you follow? You damned fool – of course you should follow! Stay on his trail!’
A voice spoke behind her. ‘That description, AtriPreda...’
She twisted round in her saddle.
Orbyn Truthfinder, sheathed in sweat, stood amidst the carnage, his small eyes fixed on her.
Bivatt bared her teeth in a half-snarl. ‘Yes,’ she snapped. Redmask. None other.
The commander of the Patriotists in Drene pursed his lips, glanced down to scan the corpses on all sides. ‘It seems,’ he said, ‘his exile from the tribes is at an end.’
Yes.
Errant save us.
Brohl Handar stepped down from the carriage and surveyed the scene of battle. He could not imagine what sort of weapons the attackers had used, to achieve the sort of damage he saw before him. The Atri-Preda had taken charge, as more soldiery appeared, while Orbyn Truthfinder stood in the shade of the gate blockhouse entrance, silent and watching.
The Overseer approached Bivatt. ‘Atri-Preda,’ he said, ‘I see none but your own dead here.’
She glared at him, yet it was a look containing more than simple anger. He saw fear in her eyes. ‘The city was infiltrated,’ she said, ‘by an Awl warrior.’
‘This is the work of one man?’
‘It is the least of his talents.’
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‘Ah, then you know who this man is.’
‘Overseer, I am rather busy—’
‘Tell me of him.’
Grimacing, she gestured him to one side of the gate. They both had to step carefully over corpses sprawled on the slick cobblestones. ‘I think I have sent a troop of lancers out to their deaths, Overseer. My mood is not conducive to lengthy conversation.’
‘Oblige me. If a war-party of Awl’dan warriors is at the very edge of this city, there must be an organized response – one,’ he added, seeing her offended look, ‘involving the Tiste Edur as well as your units.’
After a moment, she nodded. ‘Redmask. The only name by which we know him. Even the Awl’dan have but legends of his origins—’
‘And they are?’
‘Letur Anict—’
Brohl Handar hissed in anger and glared across at Orbyn, who had moved within hearing range. ‘Why is it that every disaster begins with that man’s name?’
Bivatt resumed. ‘There was skirmishing, years ago now, between a rich Awl tribe and the Factor. Simply, Letur Anict coveted the tribe’s vast herds. He despatched agents who, one night, entered an Awl camp and succeeded in kidnapping a young woman – one of the clan leader’s daughters. The Awl, you see, were in the habit of stealing Letherii children. In any case, that daughter had a brother.’
‘Redmask.’
She nodded. ‘A younger brother. Anyway, the Factor adopted the girl into his household, and before too long she was Indebted to him—’
‘No doubt without even being aware of that. Yes, I understand. And so, in order to purchase that debt, and her own freedom, Letur demanded her father’s herds.’
‘Yes, more or less. And the clan leader agreed. Alas, even as the Factor’s forces approached the Awl camp with their 99
precious cargo, the girl plunged a knife into her own heart. Thereafter, things got rather confused. Letur Anict’s soldiers attacked the Awl camp, killing everyone—’
‘The Factor decided he would take the herds anyway.’
‘Yes. It turned out, however, that there was one survivor. A few years later, as the skirmishes grew fiercer, the Factor’s troops found themselves losing engagement after engagement. Ambushes were turned. And the name of Redmask was first heard – a new war chief. Now, what follows is even less precise than what I have described thus far. It seems there was a gathering of the clans, and Redmask spoke –argued, that is, with the Elders. He sought to unify the clans against the Letherii threat, but the Elders could not be convinced. In his rage, Redmask spoke unwise words. The Elders demanded he retract them. He refused, and so was exiled. It is said he travelled east, into the wildlands between here and Kolanse.’
‘What is the significance of the mask?’
Bivatt shook her head. ‘I don’t know. There is a legend that he killed a dragon, in the time immediately following the slaughter of his family. No more than a child – which makes the tale unlikely.’ She shrugged.
‘And so he has returned,’ Brohl Handar said, ‘or some other Awl warrior has adopted the mask and so seeks to drive fear into your hearts.’
‘No, it was him. He uses a bladed whip and a two-headed axe. The weapons themselves are virtually mythical.’
The Overseer frowned at her. ‘Mythical?’
‘Awl legends hold that their people once fought a war, far to the east, when the Awl dwelt in the wildlands. The cadaran and rygtha were weapons designed to deal with that enemy. I have no more details than what I have just given you, except that it appears that whatever that enemy was, it wasn’t human.’
‘Every tribe has tales of past wars, an age of heroes—’ ‘Overseer, the Awl’dan legends are not like that.’
‘Oh?’
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‘Yes. First of all, the Awl lost that war. That is why they fled west.’
‘Have there been no Letherii expeditions into the wildlands?’
‘Not in decades, Overseer. After all, we are clashing with the various territories and kingdoms along that border. The last expedition was virtually wiped out, a single survivor driven mad by what she had seen. She spoke of something called the Hissing Night. The voice of death, apparently. In any case, her madness could not be healed and so she was put to death.’
Brohl Handar considered that for a time. An officer had arrived and was waiting to speak with the Atri-Preda. ‘Thank you,’ he said to Bivatt, then turned away.
‘Overseer.’
He faced her again. ‘Yes?’
‘If Redmask succeeds this time ... with the tribes, I mean, well, we shall indeed have need of the Tiste Edur.’
His brows rose. ‘Of course, Atri-Preda.’ And maybe this way, I can reach the ear of the Emperor and Hannan Mosag. Damn this Letur Anict. What has he brought down upon us now?
He rode the Letherii horse hard, leaving the north road and cutting east, across freshly tilled fields that had once been Awl’dan grazing land. His passage drew the attention of farmers, and from the last hamlet he skirted three stationed soldiers had saddled horses and set off in pursuit.
In a dip of the valley Redmask had just left, they met their deaths in a chorus of animal and human screams, piercing but short-lived.
A bluster of rhinazan spun in a raucous cloud over the Awl warrior’s head, driven away from their favoured hosts by the violence, their wings beating like tiny drums and their long serrated tails hissing in the air as they tracked Redmask. He had long since grown used to their ubiquitous presence. Residents of the wildlands, the weasel-sized flying
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reptiles were far from home, unless their hosts – in the valley behind him and probably preparing another ambush – could be called home.
He slowed his horse, shifting in discomfort at the awkward Letherii saddle. No-one would reach him now, he knew, and there was no point in running this beast into the ground. The enemy had been confident in their city garrison, brazen with their trophies, and Redmask had learned much in the night and the day he had spent watching them. Bluerose lancers, properly stirruped and nimble on their mounts. Far more formidable than the foot soldiers of years before.
And thus far, since his return, he had seen of his own people only abandoned camps, drover tracks from smallish herds and disused tipi rings. It was as if his home had been decimated, and all the survivors had fled. And at the only scene of battle he had come upon, there had been naught but the corpses of foreigners.
The sun was low on the horizon behind him, dusk closing in, when he came upon the first burned Awl’dan encampment. A year old, maybe more. White bones jutting from the grasses, blackened stumps from the hut frames, a dusty smell of desolation. No-one had come to retrieve the fallen, to lift the butchered bodies onto lashed platforms, freeing the souls to dance with the carrion birds. The scene raised grim memories.
He rode on. As the darkness gathered, the rhinazan slowly drifted away, and Redmask could hear the doublethump, one set to either side, as his two companions, their bloody work done, moved up into flanking positions, barely visible in the gloom.
The rhinazan settled onto the horizontal, scaled backs, to lick splashed gore and pluck ticks, to lift their heads in snapping motions, inhaling sharply to draw in the biting insects that buzzed too close.
Redmask allowed his eyes to half close – he had been awake for most of two days. With Sag’Churok, the hulking
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male, gliding over the ground to his right; and Gunth Mach, the young drone that was even now growing into a female, on his left, he could not be more secure.
Like the rhinazan, the two K’Chain Che’Malle seemed content, even in this strange land and so far away from their kin.
Content to follow Redmask, to protect him, to kill Letherii.
And he had no idea why.
Silchas Ruin’s eyes were reptilian in the lantern light, no more appropriate a sight possible given the chamber they now found themselves in, as far as Seren Pedac was concerned. The stone walls, curving upward to a dome, were carved in overlapping scales. The unbroken pattern left her feeling disoriented, slightly nauseous. She settled onto the floor, blinked the grit from her eyes.
It must be near morning, she judged. They had been walking tunnels, ascending inclines and spiralling ramps for most of an entire night. The air was stale, despite the steady downward flow of currents, as if it was gathering ghosts with every chamber and down every corridor it traversed.
She glanced away from her regard of Silchas Ruin, irritated at her own fascination with the savage, unearthly warrior, the way he could hold himself so perfectly still, even the rise and fall of his chest barely discernible. Buried for millennia, yet he did indeed live. Blood flowed in his veins, thoughts rose grimed with the dust of disuse. When he spoke, she could hear the weight of barrowstones. It was unimaginable to her how a person could so suffer without going mad.
Then again, perhaps he was mad, something hidden deep within him, either constrained by exigencies, or simply awaiting release. As a killer – for that surely was what he was – he was both thorough and dispassionate. As if mortal lives could be reduced in meaning, reduced to surgical judgement: obstacle or ally. Nothing else mattered.
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She understood the comfort of seeing the world in that manner. The ease of its simplicity was inviting. But for her, impossible. One could not will oneself blind to the complexities of the world. Yet, for Silchas Ruin, such seeming complexities were without relevance. He had found a kind of certainty, and it was unassailable.
Alas, Fear Sengar was not prepared to accept the hopelessness of his constant assaults upon Silchas Ruin. The Tiste Edur stood near the triangular portal they would soon pass through, as if impatient with this rest stop. ‘You think,’ he now said to Silchas Ruin, ‘that I know virtually nothing of that ancient war, the invasion of this realm.’
The albino Tiste Andii’s eyes shifted, fixed on Fear Sengar, but Silchas Ruin made no reply.
‘The women remembered,’ Fear said. ‘They passed the tales to their daughters. Generation after generation. Yes, I know that Scabandari drove a knife into your back, there on that hill overlooking the field of battle. Yet, was this the first betrayal?’
If he was expecting a reaction, he was disappointed.
Udinaas loosed a low laugh from where he sat with his back to the scaled wall. ‘You two are so pointless,’ he said. ‘Who betrayed whom. What does it matter? It’s not as if we’re relying on trust to keep us together. Tell me, Fear Sengar – once-master of mine – does your brother have any idea of who Ruin is? Where he came from? I would suggest not. Else he would have come after us personally, with ten thousand warriors at his back. Instead, they toy with us. Aren’t you even curious why?’
No-one spoke for a half-dozen heartbeats, then Kettle giggled, drawing all eyes to her. Her blink was owlish. ‘They want us to find what we’re looking for first, of course.’
‘Then why block our attempts to travel inland?’ Seren demanded.
‘Because they know it’s the wrong direction.’
‘How could they know that?’
Kettle’s small, dust-stained hands fluttered like bats in
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the gloom. ‘The Crippled God told them, that’s how. The Crippled God said it’s not yet time to travel east. He’s not ready for open war, yet. He doesn’t want us to go into the wildlands, where all the secrets are waiting.’
Seren Pedac stared at the child. ‘Who in Errant’s name is the Crippled God?’
‘The one who gave Rhulad his sword, Acquitor. The true power behind the Tiste Edur.’ Kettle threw up her hands. ‘Scabandari’s dead. The bargain was Hannan Mosag’s, and the coin was Rhulad Sengar.’
Fear stood with bared teeth, staring at Kettle with something like terror in his eyes. ‘How do you know this?’ he demanded.
‘The dead told me. They told me lots of things. So did the ones under the trees, the trapped ones. And they said something else too. They said the vast wheel is about to turn, one last time, before it closes. It closes, because it has to, because that’s how he made it. To tell him all he needs to know. To tell him the truth.’
‘Tell who?’ Seren asked, scowling in confusion.
‘Him, the one who’s coming. You’ll see.’ She ran over to where Fear stood, took him by one hand and started tugging. ‘We need to hurry, or they’ll get us. And if they get us, Silchas Ruin will have to kill everyone.’
I could strangle that child. But she pushed herself to her feet once more.
Udinaas was laughing.
She was inclined to strangle him as well.
‘Silchas,’ she said as she moved close, ‘do you have any idea what Kettle was talking about?’
‘No, Acquitor. But,’ he added, ‘I intend to keep listening.’
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CHAPTER THREE
We came upon the fiend on the eastern slope of the Radagar Spine. It was lying in a shallow gorge formed by flash flooding, and the stench pervading the hot air told us of rotting flesh, and indeed upon examination, conducted with utmost caution on this, the very day following the ambush on our camp by unknown attackers, we discovered that the fiend was, while still alive, mortally wounded. How to describe such a demonic entity? When upright, it would have balanced on two hugely muscled hind legs, reminiscent of that of a shaba, the flightless bird found on the isles of the Draconean Archipelago, yet in comparison much larger here. The hip level of the fiend, when standing, would have been at a man’s eye level. Long-tailed, the weight of the fiend’s torso evenly balanced by its hips, thrusting the long neck and head far forward, the spine made horizontal. Two long forelimbs, thickly bound in muscle and hardened scales providing natural armour, ended, not in grasping talons or hands, but enormous swords, iron-bladed, that seemed fused, metal to bone, with the wrists. The head was snouted, like that of a crocodile, such as those found in the mud of the southern shoreline of the Bluerose Sea, yet, again, here much larger. Desiccation had peeled the lips back to reveal jagged rows of fangs, each
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one dagger-long. The eyes, clouded with approaching death, were nonetheless uncanny and alien to our senses.
The Atri-Preda, bold as ever, strode forward to deliver the fiend from its suffering, with a sword thrust into the soft tissue of its throat. With this fatal wound, the fiend loosed a death cry that struck us with pain, for the sound it voiced was beyond our range of hearing, yet it burst in our skulls with such ferocity that blood was driven from our nostrils, eyes and ears.
One other detail is worth noting, before I expound on the extent of said injuries. The wounds visible upon the fiend were most curious. Elongated, curving slashes, perhaps from some form of tentacle, but a tentacle bearing sharp teeth, whilst other wounds were shorter but deeper in nature, invariably delivered to a region vital to locomotion or other similar dispensation of limbs, severing tendons and so forth...
He was not a man in bed. Oh, his parts functioned well enough, but in every other way he was a child, this Emperor of a Thousand Deaths. But worst of all, Nisall decided, was what happened afterwards, as he fell into that half-sleep, half-something else, limbs spasming, endless words tumbling from him in a litany of pleading, punctuated by despairing sobs that scraped the scented air of the chamber. And before long, after she’d escaped the bed itself, drawing a robe about her and taking position near the painted scene in the false window, five paces distant, she would watch him crawl down onto the floor and make his way as if crippled from some spinal injury, the ever-present sword trailing in one hand, across the room to the corner, where he would spend the rest of the night, curled up, locked in some eternal nightmare.
Factor Breneda Anict, Expedition into the Wildlands Official Annals of Pufanan Ibyris
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A thousand deaths, lived through night upon night. A thousand.
An exaggeration, of course. A few hundred at most.
Emperor Rhulad’s torment was not the product of a fevered imagination, nor born of a host of anxieties. What haunted him were the truths of his past. She was able to identify some of his mutterings, in particular the one that dominated his nightmares, for she had been there. In the throne room, witness to Rhulad’s non-death, weeping there on the floor all slick with his spilled blood, with a corpse on his throne and Rhulad’s own slayer lying half upright against the dais – stolen away by poison.
Hannan Mosag’s pathetic slither towards that throne had been halted by the demon that had appeared to collect the body of Brys Beddict, and the almost indifferent sword thrust that killed Rhulad as the apparition made its way out.
The Emperor’s awakening shriek had turned her heart into a frozen lump, a cry so brutally raw that she felt its fire in her own throat.
But it was what followed, a short time after his return, that stalked Rhulad with a thousand dripping blades.
To die, only to return, is to never escape. Never escape ... anything.
Wounds closing, he had lifted himself up, onto his hands and knees, still gripping the cursed sword, the weapon that would not let go. Weeping, drawing in ragged breaths, he crawled towards the throne, sagging down once more when he reached the dais.
Nisall had stepped out from where she had hidden moments earlier. Her mind was numb – the suicide of her king – her lover – and the Eunuch, Nifadas – the shocks, one upon another in this terrible throne room, the deaths, tumbling like crowded gravestones in a flooded field. Triban Gnol, ever the pragmatist, knelt before the new Emperor, pledging his service with the ease of an eel sliding under a new rock. The First Consort had been witness, as
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well, but she could not see Turudal Brizad now, as Rhulad, blood-wet coins gleaming, twisted round on the step and bared his teeth at Hannan Mosag.
‘Not yours,’ he said in a rasp.
‘Rhulad—’
‘Emperor! And you, Hannan Mosag, are my Ceda. Warlock King no longer. My Ceda, yes.’
‘Your wife—’
‘Dead. Yes.’ Rhulad lifted himself onto the dais, then rose, staring now at the dead Letherii king, Ezgara Diskanar. Then he reached out with his unburdened hand, grasped the front of the king’s brocaded tunic, and dragged the corpse from the throne, letting it fall to one side, head crunching on the tiled floor. A shiver seemed to rack through Rhulad. Then he sat on the throne and looked out, eyes settling once more on Hannan Mosag. ‘Ceda,’ he said, ‘in this, our chamber, you will ever approach us on your belly, as you do now.’
From the shadows at the far end of the throne room there came a phlegmatic cackle.
Rhulad flinched, then said, ‘Now you will leave us, Ceda. And take that hag Janall and her son with you.’
‘Emperor, please, you must understand—’
‘Get out! ’
The shriek jarred Nisall, and she hesitated, fighting the urge to flee, to get away from this place. From the court, from the city, from everything.
Then his free hand snapped out and without turning he said to her, ‘Not you, whore. You stay.’
Whore. ‘That term is inappropriate,’ she said, then stiffened in fear, surprised by her own temerity.
He fixed feverish eyes on her. Then, incongruously, he waved dismissively and spoke with sudden weariness. ‘Of course. We apologize. Imperial Concubine...’ His glittering face twisted in a half-smile. ‘Your king should have taken you as well. He was being selfish, or perhaps his love for you was so deep that he could not bear inviting you into death.’
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She said nothing, for, in truth, she had no answer to give him.
‘Ah, we see the doubt in your eyes. Concubine, you have our sympathy. Know that we will not use you cruelly.’ He fell silent then, as he watched Hannan Mosag drag himself back across the threshold of the chamber’s grand entranceway. A half-dozen more Tiste Edur had appeared, tremulous in their furtive motions, their uncertainty at what they were witnessing. A hissed command from Hannan Mosag sent two into the room, each one drawing up the burlap over the mangled forms of Janall and Quillas, her son. The sound as they dragged the two flesh-filled sacks from the chamber was, to Nisall’s ears, more grisly than anything else she had yet heard on this fell day.
‘At the same time,’ the Emperor went on after a moment, ‘the title and its attendant privileges ... remain, should you so desire.’
She blinked, feeling as if she was standing on shifting sand. ‘You free me to choose, Emperor?’
A nod, the bleary, red-shot eyes still fixed on the chamber’s entranceway. ‘Udinaas,’ he whispered. ‘Betrayer. You ... you were not free to choose. Slave – my slave – I should never have trusted the darkness, never...’ He flinched once more on the throne, eyes suddenly glittering. ‘He comes.’
She had no idea whom he meant, but the raw emotion in his voice frightened her anew. What more could come on this terrible day?
Voices outside, one of them sounding bitter, then diffident.
She watched as a Tiste Edur warrior strode into the throne room. Rhulad’s brother. One of them. The one who had left Rhulad lying on the tiles. Young, handsome in that way of the Edur – both alien and perfect. She tried to recall if she had heard his name—
‘Trull,’ said the Emperor in a rasp. ‘Where is he? Where is Fear?’ 110
‘He has ... left.’
‘Left? Left us?’
‘Us. Yes, Rhulad – or do you insist I call you Emperor?’
Expressions twisted across Rhulad’s coin-studded face, one after another, then he grimaced and said, ‘You left me, too, brother. Left me bleeding ... on the floor. Do you think yourself different from Udinaas? Less a betrayer than my Letherii slave?’
‘Rhulad, would that you were my brother of old—’
‘The one you sneered down upon?’
‘If it seemed I did that, then I apologize.’
‘Yes, you see the need for that now, don’t you?’
Trull Sengar stepped forward. ‘It’s the sword, Rhulad. It is cursed – please, throw it away. Destroy it. You’ve won the throne now, you don’t need it any more—’
‘You are wrong.’ He bared his teeth, as if sickened by selfhatred. ‘Without it I am just Rhulad, youngest son of Tomad. Without the sword, brother, I am nothing.’
Trull cocked his head. ‘You have led us to conquest. I will stand beside you. So will Binadas, and our father. You have won that throne, Rhulad – you need not fear Hannan Mosag—’
‘That miserable worm? You think me frightened of him?’ The sword-tip made a snapping sound as its point jumped free of the tiles. Rhulad aimed the weapon at Trull’s chest. ‘I am the Emperor!’
‘No, you’re not,’ Trull replied. ‘Your sword is Emperor –your sword and the power behind it.’
‘Liar!’ Rhulad shrieked.
Nisall saw Trull flinch back, then steady himself. ‘Prove it.’
The Emperor’s eyes widened.
‘Shatter the sword – Sister’s blessing, just let it fall from your hand. Even that, Rhulad. Just that. Let it fall!’
‘No! I know what you want, brother! You will take it – I see you tensed, ready to dive for it – I see the truth!’ The weapon was shuddering between them, as if eager for blood, anyone’s blood.
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Trull shook his head. ‘I want it shattered, Rhulad.’
‘You cannot stand at my side,’ the Emperor hissed. ‘Too close – there is betrayal in your eyes – you left me! Crippled on the floor!’ He raised his voice. ‘Where are my warriors? Into the chamber! Your Emperor commands it!’
A half-dozen Edur warriors suddenly appeared, weapons out.
‘Trull,’ Rhulad whispered. ‘I see you have no sword. Now it is for you to drop your favoured weapon, your spear. And your knives. What? Do you fear I will slay you? Show me the trust you claim in yourself. Guide me with your honour, brother.’
She did not know it then; she did not understand enough of the Edur way of life, but she saw something in Trull’s face, a kind of surrender, but a surrender that was far more complicated, fraught, than simply disarming himself there before his brother. Levels of resignation, settling one upon another, the descent of impossible burdens – and the knowledge shared between the two brothers, of what such a surrender signified. She did not realize at the time what Trull’s answer would mean, the way it was done, not in his own name, not for himself, but for Fear. Fear Sengar, more than anyone else. She did not realize, then, the immensity of his sacrifice, as he unslung his spear and let it clatter to the tiles; as he removed his knife belt and threw it to one side.
There should have been triumph in Rhulad’s tortured eyes, then, but there wasn’t. Instead, a kind of confusion clouded his gaze, made him shy away, as if seeking help. His attention found and focused upon the six warriors, and he gestured with the sword and said in a broken voice, ‘Trull Sengar is to be Shorn. He will cease to exist, for ourself, for all Edur. Take him. Bind him. Take him away.’
Neither had she realized what that judgement, that decision, had cost Rhulad himself.
Free to choose, she had chosen to remain, for reasons she could not elucidate even in her own mind. Was there pity?
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Perhaps. Ambition, without question – for she had sensed, in that predatory manner demanded of life in the court, that there was a way through to him, a way to replace –without all the attendant history – those who were no longer at Rhulad’s side. Not one of his warrior sycophants – they were worthless, ultimately, and she knew that Rhulad was well aware of that truth. In the end, she could see, he had no-one. Not his brother, Binadas, who, like Trull, proved too close and thus too dangerous for the Emperor to keep around – and so he had sent him away, seeking champions and scattered kin of the Edur tribes. As for his father, Tomad, again the suborning role proved far too awkward to accommodate. Of the surviving K’risnan of Hannan Mosag, fully half had been sent to accompany Tomad and Binadas, so as to keep the new Ceda weak.
And all the while, as these decisions were made, as the Shorning was conducted, in secrecy, away from Letherii eyes, and as Nisall manoeuvred herself into the Emperor’s bed, the Chancellor, Triban Gnol, had watched on, with the hooded eyes of a raptor.
The consort, Turudal Brizad, had vanished, although Nisall had heard rumours among the court servants that he had not gone far; that he haunted the lesser travelled corridors and subterranean mysteries of the old palace, ghostly and rarely more than half seen. She was undecided on the veracity of such claims; even so, if he were indeed hiding still in the palace, she realized that such a thing would not surprise her in the least. It did not matter –Rhulad had no wife, after all.
The Emperor’s lover, a role she was accustomed to, although it did not seem that way. Rhulad was so young, so different from Ezgara Diskanar. His spiritual wounds were too deep to be healed by her touch, and so, even as she found herself in a position of eminence, of power – close as she was to the throne – she felt helpless. And profoundly alone.
She stood, watching the Emperor of Lether writhing as 113
he curled up ever tighter in the corner of the room. Among the whimpers, groans and gasps, he spat out fragments of his conversation with Trull, his forsaken brother. And again and again, in hoarse whispers, Rhulad begged forgiveness.
Yet a new day awaited them, she reminded herself. And she would see this broken man gather himself, collect the pieces and then take his place seated on the imperial throne, looking out with red-rimmed eyes, his fragmented armour of coins gleaming dull in the light of the traditional torches lining the chamber’s walls; and where those coins were missing, there was naught but scarred tissue, crimsonringed weals of malformed flesh. And then, this ghastly apparition would, in the course of that day, proceed to astonish her.
Eschewing the old protocols of imperial rule, the Emperor of a Thousand Deaths would sit through a presentation of petitions, an ever-growing number of citizens of the empire, poor and rich alike, who had come to accept the Imperial Invitation, feeding their courage to come face to face with their foreign ruler. For bell after bell, Rhulad would mete out justice as best he could. His struggles to understand the lives of the Letherii had touched her in unexpected ways – there was, she had come to believe, a decent soul beneath all that accursed trauma. And it was then that Nisall found herself most needed, although more often of late it was the Chancellor who dominated the advising, and she had come to realize that Triban Gnol had begun to view her as a rival. He was the principal organizer of the petitions, the filter that kept the numbers manageable, and his office had burgeoned accordingly. That his expanded staff also served as a vast and invasive web of spies in the palace was of course a given.
Thus, Nisall watched her Emperor, who had ascended the throne wading through blood, strive for benign rule, seeking a sensitivity too honest and awkward to be other than genuine. And it was breaking her heart.
For power had no interest in integrity. Even Ezgara
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Diskanar, so full of promise in his early years, had come to raise a wall between himself and the empire’s citizens in the last decade of his rule. Integrity was too vulnerable to abuse by others, and Ezgara had suffered that betrayal again and again, and, perhaps most painfully of all, from his own wife, Janall, and then their son.
Too easy to dismiss the burden of such wounds, the depth of such scars.
And Rhulad, this youngest son of an Edur noble family, had been a victim of betrayal, of what must have been true friendship – with the slave, Udinaas – and in the threads of shared blood, from his very own brothers.
But each day, he overcame the torments of the night just gone. Nisall wondered, however, how much longer that could last. She alone was witness to his inner triumph, to that extraordinary war he waged with himself every morning. The Chancellor, for all his spies, knew nothing of it – she was certain of that. And that made him dangerous in his ignorance.
She needed to speak to Triban Gnol. She needed to mend this bridge. But I will not be his spy.
A most narrow bridge, then, one to be trod with caution.
Rhulad stirred in the gloom.
And then he whispered, ‘I know what you want, brother...
‘So guide me ... guide me with your honour...’
Ah, Trull Sengar, wherever your spirit now lurks, does it please you? Does this please you, to know that your Shorning failed?
So that you have now returned.
To so haunt Rhulad.
‘Guide me,’ Rhulad croaked.
The sword scraped on the floor, rippling over mosaic stones like cold laughter.
‘It is not possible, I’m afraid.’
Bruthen Trana studied the Letherii standing before him for a long moment and said nothing.
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The Chancellor’s gaze flicked away, as if distracted, and seemed moments from dismissing the Edur warrior outright; then, perhaps realizing that might be unwise, he cleared his throat and spoke in a tone of sympathy. ‘The Emperor insists on these petitions, as you are aware, and they consume his every waking moment. They are, if you forgive me, his obsession.’ His brows lifted a fraction. ‘How can a true subject question their Emperor’s love of justice? The citizens have come to adore him. They have come to see him for the honourable ruler he is in truth. That transition has taken some time, I admit, and involved immense effort on our part.’
‘I wish to speak to the Emperor,’ Bruthen said, his tone matching precisely the previous time he had spoken those words.
Triban Gnol sighed. ‘Presumably you wish to make your report regarding Invigilator Karos Invictad and his Patriotists in person. I assure you, I do forward said reports.’ He frowned at the Tiste Edur, then nodded and said, ‘Very well. I will convey your wishes to his highness, Bruthen Trana.’
‘If need be, place me among the petitioners.’
‘That will not be necessary.’
The Tiste Edur gazed at the Chancellor for a half-dozen heartbeats, then he turned about and left the office. In the larger room beyond waited a crowd of Letherii. A score of faces turned to regard Bruthen as he threaded his way through – faces nervous, struggling with fear – while others studied the Tiste Edur with eyes that gave away nothing: the Chancellor’s agents, the ones who, Bruthen suspected, went out each morning to round up the day’s petitioners, then coached them in what to say to their Emperor.
Ignoring the Letherii as they parted to let him pass, he made his way out into the corridor, then onward through the maze of chambers, hallways and passages that composed the palace. He saw very few other Tiste Edur, barring one of Hannan Mosag’s K’risnan, bent-backed and
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walking with one shoulder scraping against a wall, dark eyes flickering an acknowledgement as he limped along.
Bruthen Trana made his way into the wing of the palace closest to the river, and here the air was clammy, the corridors mostly empty. While the flooding that had occurred during the early stages of construction had been rectified, via an ingenious system of subsurface pylons, it seemed nothing could dispel the damp. Holes had been knocked in outer walls to create a flow of air, to little effect apart from filling the musty gloom with the scent of river mud and decaying plants.
Bruthen walked through one such hole, emerging out onto a mostly broken-up cobble path, with felled trees rotting amidst high grasses off to his left and the foundations of a small building to his right. Abandonment lingered in the still air like suspended pollen, and Bruthen was alone as he ascended the path’s uneven slope to arrive at the edge of a cleared area, at the other end of which rose the ancient tower of the Azath, with the lesser structures of the Jaghut to either side. In this clearing there were grave markers, set out in no discernible order. Half-buried urns, wax-sealed at the mouth, from which emerged weapons. Swords, broken spears, axes, maces – trophies of failure, a stunted forest of iron.
The Fallen Champions, the residents of a most prestigious cemetery. All had killed Rhulad at least once, some more than once – the greatest of these, an almost fullblood Tarthenal, had slain the Emperor seven times, and Bruthen could remember, with absolute clarity, the look of growing rage and terror in that Tarthenal’s bestial face each time his fallen opponent arose, renewed, stronger and deadlier than he had been only moments earlier.
He entered the bizarre necropolis, eyes drifting across the various weapons, once so lovingly cared for – many of them bearing names – but now sheathed in rust. At the far end, slightly separated from all the others, stood an empty urn. Months earlier, out of curiosity, he had reached down into 117
it, and found a silver cup. The cup that had contained the poison that killed three Letherii in the throne room – that had killed Brys Beddict.
No ashes. Even his sword had disappeared.
Bruthen Trana suspected that if this man were to return, now, he would face Rhulad again, and do what he did before. No, it was more than suspicion. A certainty.
Unseen by Rhulad, as the new Emperor lay there, cut to shreds on the floor, Bruthen had edged into the chamber to see for himself. And in that moment’s fearful glance, he had discerned the appalling precision of that butchery. Brys Beddict had been perfunctory. Like a scholar dissecting a weak argument, an effort on his part no greater than tying on his moccasins.
Would that he had seen the duel itself, that he had witnessed the artistry of this tragically slain Letherii swordsman.
He stood, looking down at the dusty, web-covered urn. And prayed for Brys Beddict’s return.
A pattern was taking shape, incrementally, inexorably. Yet the Errant, once known as Turudal Brizad, Consort to Queen Janall, could not discern its meaning. The sensation, of unease, of dread, was new to him. Indeed, he considered, one could not imagine a more awkward state of mind for a god, here in the heart of his realm.
Oh, he had known times of violence; he had walked the ashes of dead empires, but his own sense of destiny was, even then, ever untarnished, inviolate and absolute. And, to make matters worse, patterns were his personal obsession, held to with a belief in his mastery of that arcane language, a mastery beyond challenge.
Then who is it who plays with me now?
He stood in the gloom, listening to the trickle of water seeping down some unseen wall, and stared down at the Cedance, the stone tiles of the Holds, the puzzle floor that was the very foundation of his realm. The
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Cedance. My tiles. Mine. I am the Errant. This is my game.
While before him the pattern ground on, the rumbling of stones too low and deep to hear, yet their resonance grated in his bones. Disparate pieces, coming together. A function hidden, until the last moment – when all is too late, when the closure denies every path of escape.
Do you expect me to do nothing? I am not just one more of your victims. I am the Errant. By my hand, every fate is turned. All that seems random is by my design. This is an immutable truth. It has ever been. It shall ever be.
Still, the taste of fear was on his tongue, as if he’d been sucking on dirtied coins day after day, running the wealth of an empire through his mouth. But is that bitter flow inward or out?
The grinding whisper of motion, all resolution of the images carved into the tiles ... lost. Not a single Hold would reveal itself.
The Cedance had been this way since the day Ezgara Diskanar died. The Errant would be a fool to disregard linkage, but that path of reason had yet to lead him anywhere. Perhaps it was not Ezgara’s death that mattered, but the Ceda’s. He never liked me much. And I stood and watched, as the Tiste Edur edged to one side, as he flung his spear, transfixing Kuru Qan, killing the greatest Ceda since the First Empire. My game, I’d thought at the time. But now, I wonder ...
Maybe it was Kuru Qan’s. And, somehow, it still plays out. I did not warn him of that imminent danger, did I? Before his last breath rattled, he would have comprehended that ... omission.
Has this damned mortal cursed me? Me, a god!
Such a curse should be vulnerable. Not even Kuru Qan was capable of fashioning something that could not be dismantled by the Errant. He need only understand its structure, all that pinned it in place, the hidden spikes guiding these tiles.
What comes? The empire is reborn, reinvigorated, revealing the veracity of the ancient prophecy. All is as I foresaw.
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His study of the blurred pavestones below the walkway became a glare. He hissed in frustration, and watched his breath plume away in the chill.
An unknown transformation, in which I see naught but the ice of my own exasperation. Thus, I see, but am blind, blind to it all.
The cold, too, was a new phenomenon. The heat of power had bled away from this place. Nothing was as it should be.
Perhaps, at some point, he would have to admit defeat. And then I will have to pay a visit to a little, crabby old man. Working as a servant to a worthless fool. Humble, I will come in search of answers. I let Tehol live, didn’t I? That must count for something.
Mael, I know you interfered last time. With unconscionable disregard for the rules. My rules. But I have forgiven you, and that, too, must count for something.
Humility tasted even worse than fear. He was not yet ready for that.
He would take command of the Cedance. But to usurp the pattern, he would first have to find its maker. Kuru Qan? He was unconvinced.
There are disturbances in the pantheons, new and old. Chaos, the stink of violence. Yes, this is a god’s meddling. Perhaps Mael himself is to blame – no, it feels wrong. More likely, he knows nothing, remains blissfully ignorant. Will it serve me to make him aware that something is awry?
An empire reborn. True, the Tiste Edur had their secrets, or at least they believed such truths were well hidden. They were not. An alien god had usurped them, and had made of a young Edur warrior an avatar, a champion, suitably flawed in grisly homage to the god’s own pathetic dysfunctions. Power from pain, glory from degradation, themes in apposition – an empire reborn offered the promise of vigour, of expansion and longevity, none of which was, he had to admit, truly assured. And such are promises.
The god shivered suddenly in the bitter cold air of this vast, 120
subterranean chamber. Shivered, on this walkway above a swirling unknown.
The pattern was taking shape.
And when it did, it would be too late.
‘It’s too late.’
‘But there must be something we can do.’
‘I’m afraid not. It’s dying, Master, and unless we take advantage of its demise right now, someone else will.’
The capabara fish had used its tentacles to crawl up the canal wall, pulling itself over the edge onto the walkway, where it flattened out, strangely spreadeagled, to lie, mouth gaping, gills gasping, watching the morning get cloudy as it expired. The beast was as long as a man is tall, as fat as a mutton merchant from the Inner Isles, and, to Tehol’s astonishment, even uglier. ‘Yet my heart breaks.’
Bugg scratched his mostly hairless pate, then sighed. ‘It’s the unusually cold water,’ he said. ‘These like their mud warm.’
‘Cold water? Can’t you do something about that?’
‘Bugg’s Hydrogation.’
‘You’re branching out?’
‘No, I was just trying on the title.’
‘How do you hydrogate?’
‘I have no idea. Well, I have, but it’s not quite a legitimate craft.’
‘Meaning it belongs in the realm of the gods.’
‘Mostly. Although,’ he said, brightening, ‘with the recent spate of flooding, and given my past experience in engineering dry foundations, I begin to see some possibilities.’
‘Can you soak investors?’
Bugg grimaced. ‘Always seeing the destructive side, aren’t you, Master?’
‘It’s my opportunistic nature. Most people,’ he added, ‘would view that as a virtue. Now, are you truly telling me you can’t save this poor fish?’
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‘Master, it’s already dead.’
‘Is it? Oh. Well, I guess we now have supper.’
‘More like fifteen suppers.’
‘In any case, I have an appointment, so I will see you and the fish at home.’
‘Why, thank you, Master.’
‘Didn’t I tell you this morning walk would prove beneficial?’
‘Not for the capabara, alas.’
‘Granted. Oh, by the way, I need you to make me a list.’
‘Of what?’
‘Ah, I will have to tell you that later. As I said, I am late for an appointment. It just occurred to me: is this fish too big for you to carry by yourself?’
‘Well,’ Bugg said, eyeing the carcass, ‘it’s small as far as capabara go – remember the one that tried to mate with a galley?’
‘The betting on that outcome overwhelmed the Drownings. I lost everything I had that day.’
‘Everything?’
‘Three copper docks, yes.’
‘What outcome did you anticipate?’
‘Why, small rowboats that could row themselves with big flippery paddles.’
‘You’re late for your appointment, Master.’
‘Wait! Don’t look! I need to do something unseemly right now.’
‘Oh, Master, really.’
Spies stood on street corners. Small squads of grey raincaped Patriotists moved through the throngs that parted to give them wide berth as they swaggered with gloved hands resting on their belted truncheons, and on their faces the bludgeon arrogance of thugs. Tehol Beddict, wearing his blanket like a sarong, walked with the benign grace of an ascetic from some obscure but harmless cult. Or at least he hoped so. To venture onto the streets of Letheras these days
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involved a certain measure of risk that had not existed in King Ezgara Diskanar’s days of pleasant neglect. While on the one hand this lent an air of intrigue and danger to every journey – including shopping for over-ripe root crops –there were also the taut nerves that one could not quell, no matter how many mouldy turnips one happened to be carrying.
Compounding matters, in this instance, was the fact that he was indeed intent on subversion. One of the first victims in this new regime had been the Rat Catchers’ Guild. Karos Invictad, the Invigilator of the Patriotists, had acted on his first day of officialdom, despatching fully a hundred agents to Scale House, the modest Guild headquarters, whereupon they effected arrests on scores of Rat Catchers, all of whom, it later turned out, were illusions – a detail unadvertised, of course, lest the dread Patriotists announce their arrival to cries of ridicule. Which would not do.
After all, tyranny has no sense of humour. Too thin-skinned, too thoroughly full of its own self-importance. Accordingly, it presents an almost overwhelming temptation – how can I not be excused the occasional mockery? Alas, the Patriotists lacked flexibility in such matters – the deadliest weapon against them was derisive laughter, and they knew it.
He crossed Quillas Canal at a lesser bridge, made his way into the less ostentatious north district, and eventually sauntered into a twisting, shadow-filled alley that had once been a dirt street, before the invention of four-wheeled wagons and side-by-side horse collars. Instead of the usual hovels and back doors that one might expect to find in such an alley, lining this one were shops that had not changed in any substantial way in the past seven hundred or so years. There, first to the right, the Half-Axe Temple of Herbs, smelling like a swamp’s sinkhole, wherein one could find a prune-faced witch who lived in a mudpit, with all her precious plants crowding the banks, or growing in the insect-flecked pool itself. It was said she had been born in that slime and was only half human; and that her mother
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had been born there too, and her mother and so on. That such conceptions were immaculate went without saying, since Tehol could hardly imagine any reasonable or even unreasonable man taking that particular plunge.
Opposite the Half-Axe was the narrow-fronted entrance to a shop devoted to short lengths of rope and wooden poles a man and a half high. Tehol had no idea how such a specialized enterprise could survive, especially in this unravelled, truncated market, yet its door had remained open for almost six centuries, locked up each night by a short length of rope and a wooden pole.
The assortment proceeding down the alley was similar only in its peculiarity. Wooden stakes and pegs in one, sandal thongs in another – not the sandals, just the thongs. A shop selling leaky pottery – not an indication of incompetence: rather, the pots were deliberately made to leak at various, precise rates of loss; a place selling unopenable boxes, another toxic dyes. Ceramic teeth, bottles filled with the urine of pregnant women, enormous amphorae containing dead pregnant women; the excreta of obese hogs; and miniature pets – dogs, cats, birds and rodents of all sorts, each one reduced in size through generation after generation of selective breeding – Tehol had seen guard dogs standing no higher than his ankle, and while cute and appropriately yappy, he had doubts as to their efficacy, although they were probably a terror for the thumbnail-sized mice and the cats that could ride an old woman’s big toe, secured there by an ingenious loop in the sandal’s thong.
Since the outlawing of the Rat Catchers’ Guild, Adventure Alley had acquired a new function, to which Tehol now set about applying himself with the insouciance of the initiated. First, into the Half-Axe, clawing his way through the vines immediately beyond the entrance, then drawing up one step short of pitching head-first into the muddy pool.
Splashing, thick slopping sounds, then a dark-skinned wrinkled face appeared amidst the high grasses fringing the
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pit. ‘It’s you,’ the witch said, grimacing then slithering out her overlong tongue to display all the leeches attached to it.
‘And it’s you,’ Tehol replied.
The red protuberance with all its friends went back inside. ‘Come in for a swim, you odious man.’
‘Come out and let your skin recover, Munuga. I happen to know you’re barely three decades old.’
‘I am a map of wisdom.’
‘As a warning against the perils of overbathing, perhaps. Where’s the fat root this time?’
‘What have you got for me first?’
‘What I always have. The only thing you ever want from me, Munuga.’
‘The only thing you’ll never give, you mean!’
Sighing, Tehol drew out from under his makeshift sarong a small vial. He held it up for her to see.
She licked her lips, which proved alarmingly complicated. ‘What kind?’
‘Capabara roe.’
‘But I want yours.’
‘I don’t produce roe.’
‘You know what I mean, Tehol Beddict.’
‘Alas, poverty is more than skin deep. Also, I have lost all incentive to be productive, in any sense of the word. After all, what kind of a world is this that I’d even contemplate delivering a child into?’
‘Tehol Beddict, you cannot deliver a child. You’re a man. Leave the delivering to me.’
‘Tell you what, climb out of that soup, dry out and let me see what you’re supposed to look like, and who knows? Extraordinary things might happen.’
Scowling, she held out an object. ‘Here’s your fat root. Give me that vial, then go away.’
‘I so look forward to next time—’
‘Tehol Beddict, do you know what fat root is used for?’
Her eyes had sharpened with suspicion, and Tehol
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